Word: ear
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...think of nothing but the savagery that occurred at the New Mexico State Penitentiary [Feb. 18], less than ten miles from my home. Good Lord, no human being deserves to have limbs severed by a blow torch or a steel spike driven from one ear to another, no matter what crime brought him to prison...
Part of the talking-ape lore may come from the subjectivity of researchers. The Sebeoks note that when Koko is asked to give the sign for drink and makes the proper gesture but touches her ear instead of her mouth, Psychologist Patterson assumes not that the gorilla has made a mistake but that it is joking. If Koko smiles when asked to frown, she is displaying a "grasp of opposites." Say the Sebeoks: "Real breakthroughs in man-ape communication are the stuff of fiction...
...frightening how much David Mamet knows about this perverse mating dance, this conflict between the it and the ego. What, has he spent his life in sticky piano bars that draw only lost stewardesses, old mailmen and dead celebrities? His ear for dialogue, for real speech by people with sore kneecaps, cannot be matched. Likewise he has a delightful knack for truisms, the pithy revelations of small minds obsessed with sexual communication--intercourse, as it were...
...hockey victory over the Soviets. The berserk din in the Olympic arena must have been dimly audible at the Canadian border 50 miles away. Anyone on the International Olympic Committee who thought that politics has nothing to do with the Games should have sampled the crowd's ear-splitting roar: "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" The feisty young American players began by raising their sticks toward the rafters in an eruption of glad amazement, and ended by arcing them into the cheering crowd for souvenirs...
...supposed to inherit the earth, and actually does just that by being his simple self. That is the trick Sellers has once again pulled off, keeping his own essential blankness intact behind his multitude of masks. This interpretation stands the intended meaning of Kosinski's fable on its ear. If Sellers' vision of the character becomes gospel for a new generation, a certain concern is justified. "They see themselves as innocent, nonverbal," Kosinski says of Chance's fan club. But "they are children of the middle class, don't forget that. They still want money, power, sex and visibility. They...