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ANC Part III: An incendiary and corrupting influence

My education continues. As it happens, so does the job.

Influence

  • 572) It was an honor to share breakfast conversation with one of the few people the disgruntled smartasses of my formless generation can genuinely look up to as a formative influence.
  • 30) His influence was considerably shorter-lived, but for at least 20 years it rolled over the United States like an aesthetic Juggernaut.
  • 574) Without the purifying influence of the press, the United States would devolve into a totalitarian police state within about 20 minutes.
  • 640) That is like saying that my pressure on the gas pedal is only one of many influences on the speed of my car.
  • 593) (As a testament to the growing influence of Hispanics in America, salsa now outsells ketchup.)
  • 714) Female physical beauty is an incendiary and corrupting influence that could lead to lawlessness, social disorder, and anarchy.
  • 144) As anticipated, the hysterectomies had a large influence on the rates and probabilities of pregnancy.

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ANC Part II: Fruitfully applied to any country in the world

More of what my job’s random, unrelated sentences from the American National Corpus have taught me.

History

  • 1727) This is the first case in American medical history in which cosmetic surgery was reported to have been caused by John Goodman.
  • 1939) It’s a staple of the assassination attempt coverage to call this operation the worst blunder in Mossad’s history.
  • 1943) (Homework assignment: find a single front-page piece in the entire history of the NYT emphasizing Hitler’s fondness for animals and children.)
  • 2479) Your inaccurate presentation of history is dangerous.
  • 2205) For the rest of us, a translation: What those tired and huddled masses that wash up on America’s shores are tired of, specifically, is history.
  • 2317) This is a poet’s or a philosopher’s approach to history that could fruitfully be applied to any country in the world.
  • 2246) Soon, however, she’s writing “A Short History of the Slut.”
  • 2322) At one point Davis borrows Walter Benjamin’s melancholy idea that history is a dialectical fairy tale–a bunch of contradictory stories people tell about themselves, “linked together by strange ironies.”
  • 2605) This is like imagining that a dinosaur died in a standing position at the Museum of Natural History.
  • 2008) I must be the person with the lowest metal content in the history of air travel.
  • 2109) I can see many other examples of this in my eating history.
  • 2672) This is something truly new in the history of the known universe.
  • 2394) Thus, I consider myself part of the constants of history, not part of an evolutionary trend.
  • 3059) Rather, it is the artistry that rubs off on the person steeped in the best parts of culture: the phrase unconsciously plucked from a 17th-century poem or 16th-century play, (no matter how corny, like Methinks the lady doth protest too much), or the single word that indicates at least passing familiarity with history (like defenestration), the fragment of an air associated with a Bach fugue.
  • 2673) In the most tragic examples, a charismatic professor will entice them into a lifetime of French medieval history, about which their curiosity is exhausted before they get their Ph.D.s.
  • 2774) If just one kid were to come home from school determined not to covet his neighbor’s ox, that would more than make up for his utter ignorance of science and history.
  • 2823) Planned Parenthood, the Museum of Natural History, CNN–what’s the connection?

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ANC Part I: Roil and split and mow them down

What my job’s random, unrelated sentences from the American National Corpus have taught me.

History

  • 845) Throughout our history, until very recently, we all had worms.
  • 849) In the history of the planet, there has never been anything as productive of life as a wheat field in Kansas.
  • 901) Japan’s long history of absorbing outside influences has resulted in a society in which people expect to have a Shinto baptism, a pseudo-Christian wedding (usually held in a hotel “chapel” and officiated by an unordained foreigner in a robe), and a Buddhist funeral.
  • 951) The Museum of History (open Tuesday–Saturday 10am–6pm, Sunday 1–6pm; closed Monday; admission HK$10 adult, HK$5 child) opened its new permanent collection at the end of August 2001.
  • 1012) Room three is devoted to the so-called heretic period of Egyptian history when Ahkenaten established a religion based on only one god and founded a capital at Tell al Amarna in central Egypt.
  • 1024) But today, the area’s golden history has been tarnished by abandonment and an ongoing parade of hustlers and lost souls wandering the boulevard.
  • 1162) Melancholy history surrounds the monastery to the southeast, down the hill.
  • 1180) We appeal to history, that defense of scoundrels, to argue that television seems a pretty harmless way to distract children, at least when you compare it to the alternatives.
  • 1362) The great bitches of entertainment history understood this.
  • 1394) The tectonic plates of history roil and split and mow them down.

See the rest.