Word: cataclysms
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That process could have been the coup de grace for Yiddish, a fusion of German, Hebrew and Slavic languages that was the lingua franca of Ashkenazic Jews for most of the past millennium. In this century the language had already suffered the cataclysm of the Holocaust as well as the adoption of English by most North American Jews, the suppression of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, and the decision by Israel to bypass Yiddish and give Hebrew the status of a national language. Lansky, who in 1979 was a graduate student in Yiddish literature at McGill University in Montreal...
...tragicomic essay on the powerlessness of traditional American boosterism in the face of true economic cataclysm, Roger & Me succeeds hilariously -- and sometimes poignantly. But it has a number of bothersome aspects. One is its treatment of the cataclysm itself. GM's layoffs were not as extensive or precipitate as Moore suggests, and many of the failed civic- improvement plans were begun years before the firings. But it may be that Moore's largest untruth involves his own screen persona. He would have us see him as a sort of Rust Belt Garrison Keillor, innocent but natively shrewd...
...from the Cholame Valley in central California to the Cajon Pass near San Bernardino, Los Angeles has experienced a succession of lesser tremors. Six quakes of at least 4.5 magnitude have been registered in the past two years, and some geologists suspect those rumblings are the prelude to a cataclysm...
When the earth cracks open to dismantle a city, then metaphysical questions come boiling up. What would Muir learn? What does the cataclysm have to teach? That the earth retains its genius for the wild surprise? Or that some profound principle of disorder and annihilating wrath has been set loose in the world...
...earthquakes. For some time mankind has been in the business of manufacturing its own disasters -- wars, acid rain and other pollutions, drugs, a globe aswarm with refugees. Perhaps it is a relief for a moment to be face to face with a disaster that man did not invent, a cataclysm that has at least a sort of innocence of origin in larger powers...