Word: alarming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Like the hungry infant's cry, the car alarm is designed to be unignorable -- that is, unendurable. One popular model from Code-Alarm, for example, puts out 125 decibels: "Louder than a police siren," says a publicist, "louder than a rock concert." A good car alarm is a sharp blade of sound: it pierces sleep, it goes into the skull like an oyster knife. In a neighborhood of apartment buildings, one such beast rouses sleepers by the hundreds, even thousands. They wake, roll over, moan, jam pillows on their ears and try to suppress the adrenaline...
...much. "Whoop! Scream! Whoop!" goes the traumatized Lumina. A passerby hearing the alarm rushes toward the beleaguered car, shaking his umbrella and addressing the car thief, "See here, my man! Unhand that vehicle!" Right...
...scene, by contrast, from real life: One recent evening on West 68th Street in Manhattan, the alarm on a little red sports car goes off. Who knows what started it? The passing thunderstorm, a bump from a car pulling into the % parking space ahead, someone leaning against the fender? The plates on the wailing car indicate that it comes from Long Island. After 15 or 20 minutes someone puts a note on the windshield: GO BACK TO LONG ISLAND WHERE YOU BELONG AND LEAVE YOUR ALARM THERE. Two hours pass; alarm still wailing. Someone else scrawls some impolite advice...
...police responded whenever an alarm shrieked wolf, they would waste time and taxpayers' money, and dull their own crime-fighting reflexes. The endless ululations of alarms in big cities fray people's nerves, inure them to noise and, on a deeper level, undermine their civic morale, their subliminal expectations. Crime, no crime -- the distinction vanishes in undifferentiated wailing and rage. The machine screams. The quality of life within earshot dies a little more...
LIVING The shrieking, whooping car alarm is a crime in itself...