Word: dooms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Shakespeare's Thane is a man possessed by his own craving for power. He is destroyed by the evil within himself, not, as Polanski would have it, by witchly auguries of doom. Polanski is most at home dealing with black magic, and Macbeth's second meeting with the witches ("Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble . . .") is expanded into a veritable convention, with dozens of naked, withered old crones cackling and drooling all over themselves. It looks like a remnant of Rosemary's Baby. Polanski's affection for the supernatural is so unrestrained that many of the movie...
Rabbit knew the guy was half-crocked: "Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath." But a feeling of unease, of inevitable doom, sank into his gut, and he returned to Brewer. Finally disappointed by a mistress too scared to let Rabbit get through to her, and slightly stirred by the selfless (if misguided) urgings of an Episcopalian minister, he returned to his wife Janice as well...
...than William the Conqueror, showing how words have changed color through the ages. Before becoming a game, Badminton served variously as the name of an English country estate and a cooling drink. As late as 1848, "snoop" meant "to appropriate or consume dainties in a clandestine manner." The word doom was a synonym for statute until legal proceedings and human nature changed its meaning. Even though the microprinting can be read only with the accompanying magnifying glass, which makes for hard browsing, the whole O.E.D. in two volumes is the etymological buy of a decade...
...decade ago, but in the socially aware '70s it has reached full blossom. The comics' caped crusaders have become as outraged about racial injustice as the congressional Black Caucus and as worried about pollution as the Sierra Club. Archfiends with memorable names like the Hulk and Dr. Doom are still around, but they are often pushed off the page by such new villains as air pollution and social injustice. Sometimes, indeed, the comics read like a New York Times Illustrated...
...California, the home of Sirhan Sirhan, the Zodiac Killer, Juan Corona, Altamont, People's Park, the Donner Party, the San Andreas Fault, and Richard Nixon, thus begat another symbol of doom and yet another disciple of destruction, this one the most feared of all, coyote-man Charles Manson. For if Manson was given to referring to himself as a coyote who heard and knew all, whose senses were sharp enough to catch any stirrings of life outside his void, then those he surrounded himself with were the rabbits, plump and innocent, waiting for the kill...