Word: bums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There are plenty of bums in Cambridge. Don't call them transients, vagrants, victims. They're bums. Who smell bad. Who don't work. Who talk dirty. Who sleep on vents throughout the city at night when it's fifteen degrees or colder while passersby proffer money and pity and wonder what it's like to be one of them. A bum in Cambridge. To huddle on a heat vent...
...grates were harmless enough to look at. Like bicycle racks or bar-becue grills. They weren't very cleverly constructed, however. A bum could stick his legs through, hang his head down, reach with his fingers, press with his chest. But it must have played hell on a poor man's posture...
...Leverett student demonstrated what might happen if a bum attempted to sleep on the grates. Leaning back like a Limbo dancer across the sabotaged ironwork, he found himself tumbling on the cold concrete. Everybody laughed and examined the structure. Look at those steel bolts. Solid. Soddered tight. Fresh coat of paint too. Reinforced steel...
...things in life are more sickening than the sight of a bum who has just vomited on himself. But the iron grates provided a potent exception. They had a certain diffident brutality to them. Like the Berlin Wall. Or a jail cell. Or a strait jacket. Or a cage. They had that fragile, arrogant look of an injustice that won't be tolerated. And owing to the press, and the pressure, and an organized populace, the grates were not tolerated. They were removed...
...integrity, loyalty to a view of the world that the schizophrenic is willing to stake his life on." Szasz saw schizophrenia as a "legal-cultural fiction." Said he: "It's useful to Mr. and Mrs. Hinckley to think of their son as schizophrenic when he's really just a bum...