Word: fads
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With all the hoopla about American products coming out of Moscow last week, one might have thought Madison Avenue had been moved to Gorky Street. First came endorsement of blue jeans, a commodity the Kremlin had always disdained as a capitalist fad worn only by parasites. Nonsense, declared Izvestia, "Texas trousers" are "very useful," adding reassuringly that "the origin of blue jeans is not with Hollywood movie stars, but with real cowboys, who don't take part in wild chases and romantic gunplay, but in honest and hard work...
...opinion of the gift is mixed. The university chaplain, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., regards glossolalia as a genuine religious experience and as a natural way for students to gain "emotional release" from the tensions of college life. Another New Haven cleric rejects the phenomenon as "a gentlemanly fad." Students mostly take a dim view. "My grandmother had her Ouija board," says one. "My mother had her Bridey Murphy. Now they have this. It's all the same to me." The glossolalists expect skepticism, and respond with a rueful joke: "Maybe this is what St. Paul means...
...that the New Frontier has launched the 50-mile-hike fad, how about Mr. Kennedy's going one step farther and starting a 90-mile-cruise fad-to Cuba, to see exactly how Communism and its weapons have gained a foothold under our very nose...
Couples recline, neuroses entwine, and Benny, friendly, polite and stupid, gets drunk and inadvertently invents the mad fad of yo-yoing. To yoyo, one gets piggy-drunk, falls asleep in the subway, and rides back and forth all night. The yo-yo who makes the most trips is champion, and the crosstown shuttle does not count...
...contradicting himself without noticing it. He oscillated between extreme positions, never coming to rest at a practical one. Before the Civil War, he was an all-out pacifist; once it began, he was hell-bent on the destruction of the South. At a time when Utopian nostrums were the fad, Garrison fell for them all: religious perfectionism, phrenology, Graham bread (as a cure for neuroses), water cures, spiritualism...