Word: fad
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pianist John Jarvis uses rock overtones and country twinges to bring a welcome whiff of down- home to the New Age fad...
...here we are in the New Age, a combination of spirituality and superstition, fad and farce, about which the only thing certain is that it is not new. Nobody seems to know exactly where the term came from, but it has been around for several decades or more, and many elements of the New Age, like faith healing, fortune-telling and transmigration of souls, go back for centuries. (Ages, in general, are an uncertain affair. The Age of Aquarius, celebrated in the musical Hair, may have started in the 1960s or at the turn of the century...
...Mars was once widely believed to be inhabited by little green men, so when Orson Welles declared on the radio in 1938 that space invaders had landed, much of the nation went into a panic. And do not forget The Search for Bridey Murphy. Or the fad of talking to plants. Plus ca change...
Nobody knows just when it all started or what it all means, but millions of Americans now find themselves trying to learn about their former lives, cure illness without medicine, meet travelers from other galaxies, know the unknowable. And through the center of the fad runs the actress, dancer and now best- selling writer- teacher Shirley MacLaine. See Living...
Finally, the toys may cost too much for what they offer. Many parents, all too familiar with child-size attention spans, are wary of the latest fad. "I think these toys are getting outlandish," declares Sheila Menzies, 27, a single mother from Burbank, Calif., as she tows her two toddlers through the local Toys 'R' Us. "They are too expensive, and they leave nothing to the imagination...