Word: cranked
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...characteristic of Berger to endow some of his most unappealing characters with vitality and strength. Rev is a paranoid crank but the only person in the book to take heroic action. To keep matters consistently bizarre, Berger describes the codger's funeral through the eyes of Junior, the teen-age lout: "As he watched the bronze box being lowered into the grave he could not help thinking of that little ditty that went: Your eyes fall in/ Your teeth fall out/ The worms crawl over/ Your nose and mouth. Dying was a lousy thing, and he intended to avoid...
...cares, really, if the manual typewriter goes the way of the manual orange-juice squeezer or the crank phone? Progress is progress. It isn't as if the invention itself is dropping from existence; there are new electronic microchip jobs that automatically produce a thousand individually addressed love letters while the author snorkels in Cancún. Nor is there a great heaving nostalgia attached to the old machine. The history of its growth reads as excitingly as politics in Ottawa. Besides, people these days show far too much reflex yearning for the snows of yesteryear. Let the thing...
Excessive American concern with negotiability would indeed encourage, and reward, Soviet stonewalling. But by stubbornly pursuing proposals that seem almost intended to get nowhere, the Administration has touched off a backlash, both at home and abroad, against necessary military programs. It has also, if anything, encouraged the Soviets to crank out even more weapons that will eventually have to be countered militarily or bargained over diplomatically, or both. Just as the U.S. is trying, not very successfully, to punish the Soviets for their accumulation of military power in the past, part of the Soviet strategy right now is to punish...
Some aspects of the Falklands' somnolent life have not changed. There is no television, though videocassette players are proliferating (the most popular movies: M*A*S*H and Julia). The telephones have crank handles and are operated by a sole switchboard. The brightly painted clapboard houses are heated with bricks of black peat stored in sheds near kitchen doors, and Land Rovers are the most popular means of transportation. The largest store is run by the Falkland Islands Co., which owns more than 43% of the land and employs 240 workers. Mutton, delivered to homes twice a week...
Douglas Bush died on March 2 at the age of 86, after 46 years as professor of English literature at Harvard and a life of devotion to Paradise Lost. The obituary in the New York Times made him out a gentle crank, quoting a complaint of Bush's that too many students attend universities these days, and thus cannot be adequately educated-the sort of hackneyed wail that Bush himself would never have dwelt on or even considered right plucked from a greater, kindlier context. Bush's world was the greater, kindlier context. Like Samuel Johnson he knew...