Word: cult
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When two Memphis policemen answered a routine call about a shoplifting suspect at a house in a working-class black neighborhood last week, they had no idea that seven members of a fanatical religious cult were waiting for them inside. Led by Lindberg Sanders, 49, a self-styled "black Jesus," the Bible-reading cultists considered police to be agents of the devil. Some 30 hours after the police visit, eight people lay dead, including a patrolman who had been held hostage and then beaten to death...
...trouble began Tuesday afternoon when officers visited the house at 2239 Shannon in response to a phone tip about a shoplifter. They failed to find the suspect. But later, they were called back to the brick and frame dwelling to answer a complaint from one of the cult members about the police's handling of the investigation. As two officers entered the house, the occupants jumped them, and shots were exchanged. One officer put out a call for help, which was answered by two more policemen. When all four officers were inside the house, a short gun battle took...
WHAT WAS IT ABOUT JAMES DEAN that enabled him to attract the cult-like, fanatical worship of thousands of teenage American girls from Hollywood to the drought-ridden town of McCarthy, Texas? What was it about these teenagers in the 1950s that made them treat Dean like a second messiah before and after his tragic death on September 30, 1955? And what was it about our society that prevented some of these teenagers from developing into mature, emotionally secure adults...
...high priests of any new religion, these keepers of the computer faith like to rename familiar things (How else could a TV screen become a monitor?). They like even more to give new things names that are as mystifying to an outsider as the secret password of an esoteric cult. Thus the computer's two forms of "memory" are known as RAM and ROM. The temporary memory, RAM, meaning "random-access memory," can easily be changed; the permanent memory, ROM, meaning "read-only memory," cannot be modified...
Much of Casablanca's constituency is collegiate anyway. Generations of Harvard students have wandered out of the Brattle Theater in a state of sappy exaltation. The movie's audience is too large to be described as a cult, but the religious vibration in that word may be oddly right...