Word: afflicts
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Touch and Tell. In the first groups she entered, Jane felt dismissed as an "uptight Easterner" and got off some bitchy backchat: "You don't interest me as much as I seem to interest you." Loosening a little, she began to make Freudian howlers that commonly afflict the beginner in therapy-as when, pretending to be a mailbox, she blithely announced: "I'm hoping for a lot of good long letters." But soon her antennae told her that she was not the only one out of step. All was not well in the land of touch and tell...
According to the U.S. Office of Emergency Preparedness, much of the nation faces a shortage of electricity this summer. Power failures may afflict Chicago, St. Louis and Minneapolis-St. Paul, plus most of the Eastern Seaboard from New York to Georgia. All these areas can expect regular "brownouts"-voltage reductions that dim lights, slow the whir of air conditioners to a whisper and obscure TV pictures with blizzards of snow...
...whites, the apotheosis at first seems unsettling. Many Americans recall Malcolm X only as a bad guy, known mainly for preaching racism. Is the continuing Malcolm X cult just one more outrageous byproduct of the rage and rhetoric that afflict race politics and U.S. culture in general? The answer is, no. And the best way of learning why is to examine yet another post-Malcolm X phenomenon, the spate of books by or about the former Black Muslim leader that have made him a minor industry in the publishing business...
...produce the muddle in which man finds himself. God did not bring about the wars, the poverty, the diseases, the endless woes that afflict the human race. God did not sponsor the greed, the class division and the racial hatreds that seethe about us like unhealthy geysers. Let us not blame God for the corruption and callousness of public officials, for sickening slums, for thousands of drug addicts, for selfishness and stupidity...
Durrell dutifully and deftly relates such episodes, customarily avoiding the smug coziness that tends to afflict family anecdotage as a genre. But the boy who grew into a topflight zoologist was always slightly more interested in the doings of four-legged animals than two. At picnics, he was absorbed, not annoyed, by flies and ants. His endless hours of watching in the fields and at the edge of the sea were rewarded by such wonders as the sight of two snails mating. Sidling up side-to-side, each fired out a small white dart on a slender rope that thunked...