Word: fad
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...notable invention: a system for transmitting several messages simultaneously over existing electric power lines. In 1922, nearing retirement, he took his ideas and his patents to the North American Co. utilities combine, which backed him in launching Wired Radio, Inc., a kind of competitor to the booming fad for wireless radio. But not until 1934, the year of his death, did the general think up a catchy new name, combining the sound of music with the sound of the popular camera called the Kodak...
...carbonated candy that crackled and popped when eaten. The candy was so effervescent that the company had to disprove rumors that children who swallowed the granules too fast would get a stomachful of carbonation. But the candy was nothing that youngsters could sink their teeth into, and the fad eventually lost its fizz...
Break dancing has been banned from certain shopping malls, sidewalks and no doubt countless living rooms as a public nuisance. But the ghetto-born dance fad, with its twirls, windmills and head spins, has shown remarkable staying power. As a result, dozens of entrepreneurs are making a fast break to cash in on its widespread popularity among teenagers by spinning off such accessories as clothing, how-to books and video games...
...soon the fad faded in red ink and rancor. The same black community leaders who would urge Paramount Pictures to suppress Ralph Bakshi's "racist" film Coonskin (and, a decade later, Sam Fuller's White Dog) were condemning blaxploitation as image suicide. Moreover, white liberal producers, reluctant to portray black men as rapists and dopers, failed to come up with alternatives. "If you're not working," says Actor Stan Shaw (Roots II), "you don't "get better...
...much a board game, more a way of life-this is Trivial Pursuit, the hottest cardboard entertainment since Scrabble, a flash-flood fad that looks to become an agreeable long-term habit. And as millions of informaniacs from the Hamptons to the White House West were testing their trivia wits this summer, the three Canadians (two former journalists and a retired hockey goaltender) who dreamed up the game in 1979 were secreted in a motel on the outskirts of Toronto, crash-coursing the last 2,000 or so questions for the Genus II U.S. edition of Trivial Pursuit...