Word: familiarizes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...believe that Reid's characters can daily consume enough Irish whiskey to stagger a water buffalo, yet retain enough brain cells to run around breaking each other's kneecaps with undiminished fervor. But trivialities and stereotypes aside, Reid still manages to entertain: his federal agents and seductresses, while quite familiar, are still endearing. And his friendly collection of priests--even though they don't act like any priests this reviewer has run across--are an interesting contrast to the Barry Fitzgerald-Bing Crosby model that has been floating around American fiction for too long...
...most singular activity was "filksinging," the science fiction fan's answer to oral literature. A filksong--the name's origin is unknown--is a series of humorous lyrics based on science fiction or fantasy themes, sung to familiar tunes in a disorganized but spirited way. As the night wears on, the singing often degenerates to more widely know, bawdy lyrics, such as "Barnacle Bill the Sailor." But the most creative songs, including "Smaug, the Magic Dragon," "Cthulhu's Days Are Here Again," "Our Space Opera Goes Rolling Along," and "Bouncing Potatoes," circulate in different versions from convention to convention...
...where young, healthy patients keep going into unexplained comas during routine operations. When he explains why he's doing it--the unimportance of the individual compared with the advancement of science--to a drugged Genevieve Bujold, the young doctor who has stumbled onto the terrible secret, the scene rings familiar. Colin Clive, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill and a thousand others have been here before, and one wonders why Widmark isn't indulging in similar eye-rolling or stuttering. Crichton forces him to become a stoic zombie, as if to hide what this really is--a hokey mad-doctor...
...could SATs possibly test the verbal capabilities of a Third World student, when many of the words used in the test do not exist in his or her environment? Words such as canopy, blender, pantry or perambulator are common for the average white student. But they are not familiar to minority students. A Third World student's depth of assimilation into a white society cannot be the only judge of future performance...
...well as punched tape, are still used. But they have been supplemented by other methods, including magnetic tapes, discs and drums; the precisely tuned beep-beeps of the Touch-Tone telephone (whose lower left and right buttons have been reserved for computer communications and other information processing); the familiar keyboard-and-TV unit; optical scanners that can "read" characters at high speeds; electronic ears that can recognize a limited number of spoken words...