Word: circularity
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VIRTUALLY every man has experienced pain and therefore knows just how it feels. But he cannot tell anybody else what it is really like. Pain cannot even be precisely defined. Lay and medical dictionaries alike offer essentially circular definitions of it as hurt, distress or suffering-pain is pain. Half the medical textbooks say little about it, except for extreme and uncommon forms, and doctors learn correspondingly little about it in medical school. The great British physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington described pain as "the psychical adjunct of an imperative protective reflex." More simply, pain is what the victim perceives...
...first hint of more serious trouble occurred after Apollo 10 had slipped into its nearly circular 69-mile orbit around the moon. Crawling through the tunnel connecting Charlie Brown to Snoopy, Stafford discovered that the padding on Charlie Brown's hatch had been ripped during the pressurization of the lunar module early in the flight, allowing snowlike fiber-glass insulation to escape and drift around the tunnel interior. During Apollo's eleventh revolution, as Stafford and Cernan prepared to undock Snoopy for its descent toward the moon, the astronauts found that they could not depressurize the connecting tunnel...
Capua's race relations deteriorate. The compulsive winner becomes a perpetual loser-until the day of the big one, the Indy 500. Director James Goldstone even manages to make a wreck of the most celebrated American auto race. Progress is as circular and unsurprising as the movement of a minute hand; the script is reminiscent of a radio play, with an announcer booming: "It's a different Frank Capua out there today!" When the film casts a sociological eye, it is toward such riddled targets as baton-twirling teeny-boppers and accident-hungry spectators...
This massive family chronicle begins impressively and then dissipates itself in authorish rhetoric and an obsessively circular kind of storytelling. In the end, the balance left to praise is slighter by the measure of Novelist Calisher's fondness for the supersubtle...
Though the Juniors did not recognize any such causes, they wrote their circular in the height of their passion against President Quincy...