Word: fads
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...teen-agers were in the throes of a new fad: squirting each other (and unwary teachers) with repeating water pistols. The junior gunmen got the idea from some of their fathers, who used the same weapons on women's legs at the American Legion Convention in Manhattan. But they had improved on the older generation's technique: they loaded up with ink, perfume, turpentine, ammonia, oil, whiskey, beer and bleaching fluids...
...Carey's project prospered from the start. Baltimore parents were delighted with the Country School's broad lawns, surrounded by deep woods. They even accepted the fresh air fad of 1901, when classrooms were built without any glass in the windows. Boys attended class in woolens and mufflers, keeping their feet on bricks which had been heated in a furnace. The boys fared well (the fresh air, it was claimed, enabled them to do two years' work in one). But constant colds among the faculty finally ended the experiment...
During World War II it had been popular to say with the geopoliticians that whoever controlled the Eurasian heartland would dominate the rimlands and the rest of the world. The geopolitical fad had passed, but the fact remained-augmented, by Russia's successes in the war and at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences, to ominous power...
Surgery has become such a fad, some critics observed, that many an operation is now performed in hopes of finding out what ails the patient, or because the surgeon wants practice, or because a patient has a morbid desire to be cut open. According to Foss, a scandalously large number of operators have had little or no special training in surgery...
...group of leading U.S. psychiatrists, headed by Dr. William C. Menninger, has now issued a stern warning against "abuses" of electric shock therapy. The psychiatrists believe that shock treatments have become a fad and are being prescribed recklessly (and ineffectually) as a cure-all for too many different neuroses...