Word: ear
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...places on their bodies. This is a country where dental floss comes in several flavors and people willingly engage in colonic irrigation to get all the nasties out of their large intestines--and where otherwise smart folk habitually ignore all warnings and put Q-Tips too far into their ears. But apparently Q-Tips aren't quite enough. The newest instrument for getting the muck out of that pesky ear canal is a lighted candle...
Candling, sometimes called coning, is today's, ahem, hottest natural treatment to remove wax from ears and, according to its proponents, relieve everything from migraines to sinusitis and postnasal drip while "promoting a healthy atmosphere," as one ad puts it. Massage therapists, beauty-salon operators and herbalists all offer the treatment. Women go to the candler for an afternoon--the average candling takes about an hour--of relaxation. And parents, when they're not candling each other with $5 kits from a health-food store, are doing it to their kids to stave off ear infections. "It's a relaxing...
...treatment, said to have originated in India or ancient Egypt, involves lighting the wide end of a hollow conical candle made of waxed cloth and gently inserting the narrow tip into the ear. The heat generated by the flame purportedly creates a vacuum that sucks out all manner of nasty things, like ear mites, along with the earwax. Afterward, adventurous souls can cut open the candle and examine their ear debris...
What Professor Chutka calls the "Aging Game" is a novel, if slightly frightening, effort to familiarize future physicians with the circumstances of the patients they will be treating when they emerge from their medical training. The goggles simulate cataracts; the ear plugs, loss of hearing; the gloves, arthritis; the socks, edema; the marshmallows, post-stroke paralysis; the corn, bunions; the neck braces, the nearly universal muscular stiffness of old age. The diapers...well, the diapers are indicative of what managers at Kimberly-Clark consider the promising future of the market for "adult-incontinence products," one of their fastest-growing areas...
American history teems with examples of the eye-gouging, ear-biting style, and on the whole, one prefers that to, say, Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, twitching his little moustache, writing letters home to his mother with the news of the day ("Dear Mater," he would begin), and saying things like, "The future lies before...