2017年9月29日 星期五

fecund, fecundity and fertility, offspring, alchemy, assisted reproductive technology


The result is a compact yet liberated primer of Bourgeois’s implicitly feminist art, its fecund repeating forms, alternately architectonic and fleshy figures, intimations of pregnancy and birth and, most famously, giant spider sculptures in bronze or steel.


AN APPRAISAL | GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, 1927-2014
Entwining Tales of Time, Memory and Love
Gabriel García Márquez, foreground, with Colombian journalist José Salgar in 2003. As a writer, Mr. García Márquez found the familiar in the fantastic.
Mr. García Márquez — who died on Thursday at his home in Mexico City, at the age of 87 — used his fecund imagination and sleight of hand to conjure the miraculous in his fiction.
 German women have fewer children

German women are having fewer babies, new research has found. The
revelation is likely to further fuel domestic debate about whether states
should give more funding to fertility treatment services for childless
couples.


OPINION | Op-Ed Contributors

Selling the Fantasy of Fertility

By MIRIAM ZOLL and PAMELA TSIGDINOS

Assisted reproductive technology fails much more often - and leaves more scars - than we are led to believe.




That spending includes pensions and benefits – in other words, redistributing money to the unemployed, the retired and the fecund from childless people with well-paid jobs. Then there’s free healthcare, free education, the army, the police, the courts, and infrastructure such as roads.
这些支出包括养老金和福利——换句话说,将资金从没有子女的高薪人士再分配给失业者、退休人士以及生育多个孩子的母亲。此外,还包括免费医疗、免费教育、军队、警察部门、法院和道路等基础设施。

If population policy can do little more to alleviate environmental damage, then the human race will have to rely on technology and governance to shift the world’s economy towards cleaner growth. Mankind needs to develop more and cheaper technologies that can enable people to enjoy the fruits of economic growth without destroying the planet’s natural capital. That’s not going to happen unless governments both use carbon pricing and other policies to encourage investment in those technologies and constrain the damage that economic development does to biodiversity.
Falling fertility may be making poor people’s lives better, but it cannot save the Earth. That lies in our own hands.



Birth Defects Tied to Fertility Techniques

By DENISE GRADY
Infants conceived with techniques commonly used in fertility clinics are two to four times more likely to have certain birth defects than are infants conceived naturally, a study found.
Future of Giant Turtle Still Uncertain
An attempt to mate two elderly turtles during this year’s breeding season ended without producing any offspring.





sleight of hand

Manual dexterity, typically in performing conjuring tricks:a nifty bit of sleight of hand got the ashtray into the correct position
MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES
  • There is every chance that he performed a little sleight of hand and other conjuring.
  • After my first success I became intensely interested and gave up the sleight of hand and conjuring work I had been doing.
  • These people are magicians - expert architects of enjoyment - performing incredible sleights of hand.
SYNONYMS
Skilful deception:this is financial sleight of hand of the worst sort
MORE EXAMPLE SENTENCES
  • He freely admitted that magic depended on deception and sleight of hand but said: ‘Origami is real magic!’
  • One of the most startling public acts of deception and sleight of hand has been undertaken by the provincial government.
  • However, people of the present day are getting more enlightened; and although they see something done beyond their ken, yet they know it is only a piece of deception or sleight of hand on the part of the performers.
offspring
[名](複 ~, ~s)
1 (人・動物の)子.

2 生じたもの, 所産, 結果.

生育力 Fecundity (經濟學)
新帕尔格雷夫经济学大词典专题
公共衛生
Fecundity and Fertility
Literally, "fecundity" means the ability to produce live offspring, and "fertility" means the actual production of live offspring. So fecundity refers to the potential production, and fertility to actual production, of live offspring. Fecundity cannot be measured, but it can be assessed clinically. Fertility and its impairments and aberrations are recorded for individuals in their medical charts and are measured in the population by routinely collected vital statistics about reproductive outcomes such as births, stillbirths, miscarriages, and so on. Fecundity and fertility are often confused. The confusion is further confounded by the fact that in French the meanings of the two similar-sounding words are reversed: fécondité means "fertility," and fertilité means "fecundity." Communication among demographers and others about these demographic details therefore requires care and awareness of this fact.
(SEE ALSO: Pregnancy; Reproduction)

It would be impossible in the brief space of an introduction such as this to discuss at any length the characteristics of Hugo as a literary artist, but a few remarks may be made on some of the features of his art which are most conspicuous in the poems selected for this volume. It is scarcely necessary to dwell upon the poet's extraordinary fecundity of words and images.
史詩 La Légende des siècles ( 1859)之 中文翻譯本,厚約702頁(『雨果文集 第三卷 /20卷』河北教育出版社)

Although this all makes for a more discursive and at times less focused narrative than that of Volume 2, “The Triumphant Years,” like its predecessors, is informed by Mr. Richardson’s consummate knowledge of Picasso’s work — his intimate understanding of the artist’s temperament and endlessly inventive styles, his expansive vocabulary of myths and motifs and, most important, the mysterious nature of the alchemy by which he transformed his own experiences and emotions into art. So incisive and revealing are Mr. Richardson’s commentaries on individual Picasso paintings and sculptures that the reader’s one serious complaint about this book is that photos of individual works discussed are not always included in this volume or do not appear on the same page on which they are so artfully deconstructed. Mr. Richardson leaves us not only with a deep appreciation of Picasso’s Promethean ambition and prodigious fecundity, but also with a shrewd understanding of his tumultuous, subversive and often disturbing art.More on the Career of the Genius Who Boldly Compared Himself to God





fertile (REPRODUCTION)
adjective
1 describes animals or plants that are able to produce (a lot of) young or fruit:
People get less fertile as they get older.
NOTE: The opposite is infertile.

2 describes a seed or egg that is able to develop into a new plant or animal


I wouldn't want to call him a liar, but he certainly has a fecund imagination.



fecund
adjective FORMAL
1 able to produce a lot of crops, fruit, babies, young animals, etc:
fecund nature/soil

2 active and productive:
a fecund career/imagination

fecundity noun [U] FORMAL

fecund

Line breaks: fec¦und
Pronunciation: /ˈfɛk(ə)nd, ˈfiːk-/

ADJECTIVE

  • 1Producing or capable of producing an abundance of offspring or new growth; highly fertile:a lush and fecund garden
  • 1.1Producing many new ideas:her fecund imagination
  • 1.2• technical Capable of bearing children.

Derivatives

fecundity[fe・cun・di・ty] 

音記号[fikʌ'ndəti]

[名][U]
1 多産性, (特に雌の動物の)多産能力;肥沃(ひよく).

2 (才能の)豊かさ.
fecundity

Pronunciation: /fɪˈkʌndɪti/
NOUN

Origin

late Middle English: from French fécond or Latinfecundus.
fertility
noun [U]
a fertility symbol
declining fertility rates

fertilize, UK USUALLY fertilise
verb [T]
to cause an egg or seed to start to develop into a new young animal or plant by joining it with a male cell:
Bees fertilize the flowers by bringing pollen.
Once an egg is fertilized by the sperm, it becomes an embryo.

fertilization, UK USUALLY fertilisation
noun [U]
In humans, fertilization is more likely to occur at certain times of the month.
alchemy /alchemist千年前舊式化學,阿拉伯追求將廉價金屬轉為貴重金屬(Transmutation of base metals into gold.);隨著這種過程,人也從出生時的基本,逐漸在性靈上發展、發現,甚至於取得魔術般能力,這有如再生(Jung心理學將這種追求渾圓、完全的過程,稱為"individulation",經驗的一些階段就稱為"archetypes"--最早從孤立無援的孤兒"Orphan"到有神助的魔術師"Magician"。這樣的轉型就是"alchemy")。 組織中的人"being"一直懼怕--而變化更是懼怕的引擎,使人們更怕。

The Pop Alchemist
追求長生不老之藥; 文藝復興期相信上帝以化學方式創造世界,所以舊式化學成為了解宇宙構成的線索。


The Alchemy of Fear, How to Break the Corporate Trance and Create Your
Company's Successful Future by Kay Gilley
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0750699094/learningorg
Newton was an alchemist.
The authors discovered that all of them--young and old alike--had endured intense, often traumatic, experiences that transformed them and became the source of their distinctive leadership abilities. Bennis and Thomas call these shaping experiences "crucibles," after the vessels medieval alchemists used in their attempts to turn base metals into gold.


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alchemy

noun
1. A medieval predecessor of chemistry devoted to things such as converting common metals into precious metals, finding a universal solvent (alkahest), and finding a universal remedy for diseases.
2. A mysterious or magical process of transformation.

Etymology
Via Old French and Medieval Latin from Arabic al-kimiya (the chemistry), from Greek khemeia (transmutation)

Usage
"An obscure mix of alchemy and chemistry yielded a waxy, glowing goo that spontaneously burst into flame -- the element now known as phosphorus." — Sean Markey; 20 Things You Didn't Know About; Discover (New York); Nov 2006.