Word: dybbuk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...buried anger, maybe, that ricocheted around in Hart, a dybbuk of compulsion. One sensed in him a territory of ignorance about himself. On the evidence of recent weeks, Hart has moments when he is overtaken by a denial of reality, a trait that might be dangerous in the Oval Office...
...really "a creature covered with scales, with an eye in his chest, and on his forehead a horn that rotated at great speed." Supernatural beings stalk the cities as well. In The Power of Darkness, a Warsaw district receives strange tidings: "The word soon spread . . . that a dybbuk had settled in Tzeitel's ear, and that it chanted the Torah, sermonized, and crowed like a rooster." The narrator of The Cafeteria meets a woman who claims to have seen Adolf Hitler on upper Broadway. Her confidant is ultimately inclined to believe her: "Esther didn't sound insane...
Gossip has always had a terrible reputation. A sin against charity, they said, quoting St. Paul. The odd, vivid term sometimes used for it was backbiting. The word suggested a sudden, predatory leap from behind-as if gossip's hairy maniacal dybbuk landed on the back of the victim's neck and sank its teeth into the spine, killing with vicious little calumnies: venoms and buzzes...