Word: cuckoo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...example: a $50,000 house in the Salisbury suburb of Highlands, whose value had dropped to $30,000 within the past year, is now selling for $60,000. But some whites take a dimmer view of the future. Says a Salisbury businessman: "The whites are living in a cuckoo land if they think nothing is going to change. The Patriotic Front has already held meetings with the East Germans on how the economy should...
...scene in which Actor Jack Nicholson receives an electric shock treatment in the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest reinforced the notion that shock therapy is a cruel and barbaric anachronism. Partially as a result of the movie, the popular image of electric shock, which had been steadily fading in the U.S., grew even dimmer. Now shock treatment is regaining popularity, defended by many psychiatrists as a safe, humane and often dramatically effective method for treating some forms of mental illness, particularly depression...
Proponents of ECT also point out that modern techniques are far removed from the horror of Cuckoo's Nest. Says Yudofsky, "The only way you physically know a seizure is taking place is that sometimes you see a finger wiggling slightly." The patient is injected with a short-acting anesthetic, then a muscle relaxant to prevent the sudden muscular contractions that in the past occasionally caused fractured bones or chipped teeth. An electrocardiogram is sometimes used to monitor the heart rhythm and oxygen is administered to prevent possible brain damage after the shock...
Readers were similarly bereft. Cross word-puzzle skills grew rusty, the spring's first cuckoo went unrecorded, and almost no one knew the name of the new captain of fives at Eton. The Times's famous letters-to-the-editor column was missed perhaps most of all. There was simply no other place to debate, as Times readers once did, how to keep one's hand warm in bed while reading (a concerned citizen's suggestion: slits in the bedclothes). Commented an Observer contributor last winter: "For those who were hooked on the Times, there...
This assault on mechanical modernism--one of Barth's correspondents describes "those symbol-fraught Swiss watches and Schwarzwald cuckoo clocks of Modernism"--hardly fits a novel that follows a schematic masterplan. You see, if you take the seven letters of the title-word "letters," superimpose them on a seven-month calendar using a quaint motto, so that the letters of the motto form the letters of "letters," then each letter of the motto will fall neatly onto a date in the calendar, one for each of the letters in the book...