Word: delirium
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Martha Taft, the Senator's wife, sailed into a meeting of Republican women in Philadelphia with a bouquet of raspish phrases. After referring to "delirium Trumans" and observing that "to err is Truman" (both times neglecting to credit the phrases to Gossipist Walter Winchell, who shortly set the record straight), she widened her traverse and characterized the Democratic Party: "a freak of nature . . . with a Communist front, a reactionary rear, and a know-nothing middle...
...while chemists called the new elements "pandemonium" and "delirium." Then one of them took a dive into Greek mythology and discovered that Pluto, god of Hades, had a goddess-friend, Persephone. Element 95, he suggested, should be named "persephonium...
...vast and desolate landscape. The convulsive and catastrophic shapes of the rocks will give a frozen notion of geological delirium. A silver spoon ten meters long will sprout directly from a rock of iron. Inside the spoon . . . two fried eggs . . . fire red. . . . Twilight shadow and the white of the eggs and the silver spoon will reflect the light of the sky . . . very precisely aquamarine...
When we read; for instance, that he thought Boston "a vast jumbled waste created by prehuman or subhuman monsters in a delirium of greed," we wonder what possibilities of contrast are left him if he should describe Europe's real "jumbled waste" cities. . . . For us, this "largest force lately to appear on the horizon of American letters" is a man to amuse a very prosperous culture which can still permit itself the undermining, disheartening, demoralizing effect of his kind of literature...
...fine Austrian hand which is responsible for the picture's most memorable moments--Birnam's organized, stumbling search down New York's Third Avenue in search of an open pawn shop, the nightmarish scene of delirium in Bellevue's alcholic ward, Birnam's whirling crash down a whole flight of stairs...