Word: aphasia
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...celebrated mesmerist and mind reader who claimed to have hypnotized more than a million people during his lifetime; of illness resulting from a brain tumor; in Miami. The Hungarian-born Polgar, who held doctorates in economics and psychology, said he discovered his telepathic powers upon recovering from amnesia and aphasia caused by World War I battle wounds. A good snowman who performed on the lecture circuit, he also conducted a lifelong campaign to establish hypnosis as a scientific discipline, especially useful as a substitute for anesthesia during childbirth and in curing the smoking habit...
Doddering Prey. With extraordinary skill, Amis manages to have fun with such things as Marigold's fear of losing her memory, Zeyer's stroke-induced nominal aphasia. (Nouns escape him and periphrasis ensues, with a passport, for example, becoming "the thing you have to show when you leave a country.") Even Shorty's interior dialogues with his own bowels are put to comic use, along with the fact that old people are often mean and silly, and fall down easily. Amis pursues his doddering prey with tiny twists of plot: through the use of stink bombs, squirt...
Sleeping Quietly. More disturbing to Estes and the boy's parents were rumors that Kevin's condition had become animallike. Kevin suffers from aphasia, a form of brain damage that makes speech difficult, and from hyperactivity. To calm his hyperactive condition, Kevin normally takes tranquilizers, as well as drugs for epilepsy. After a week, the searchers-who had spotted the boy four times, only to see him run away, once in fear of a clattering helicopter-began to speculate that his struggle with the wilderness had made him hostile and unable to speak to humans at all, even...
...Contrary to Mr. Maddocks, I would like to suggest that the reason most people rate "semantic aphasia" so low is that they intuitively recognize the problem for what it is-a pseudo problem...
...reason we rate semantic aphasia so low-somewhere between athlete's foot and the common cold on the scale of national perils-is that we don't understand the deeper implications of the disease. In his classic essay, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell pointed out what should be obvious -that sloppy language makes for sloppy thought. Emerson went so far as to suggest that bad rhetoric meant bad men. Semantic aphasia, both men recognized, kills after all. "And the Lord said: 'Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they...