Word: fatale
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was, so to speak, the proximate cause: the fatal stupidity of allowing an overweight four-seater Cessna to take off, in thin mountain air, into the violence of an early spring thunderstorm. But if it had been three adults who died as a result of that decision, the crash would have merited 10 seconds on the local news in Denver...
...traces of the obsessive. Later American parents sometimes have a tendency to practice a retro-projection that amounts to a search for their own lost, sweet, brilliant, childish selves. They indulge in a manic idealization of their young; it is the obverse of child battering but sometimes has equally fatal effects. The idealization too savors of some indirect exhibitionism that, seen in a brutal light, comes just short of amounting to child sacrifice...
PRIMAL FEAR. OR, ALTERNATIVELY, Fatal Fear, Primal Attraction, Indecent Instinct, even--why not?--Basic Exposure. Who cares, finally? These interchangeable titles all promise the same thing: the black glamour of privileged people abandoning common, repressive sense for a mad moment, thus putting their nice clothes in serious danger of becoming mussed, if not downright bloodsplattered...
...present for this claim is the fact that during the first few months after conception, a fetus cannot survive outside of her mother, with or without the aid of machines. However, this litmus test of "viability" is not a valid one. For example, there are many people with fatal illnesses for whom no machine can do any good. Yet of course these people are just as alive and just as human as the rest of us. Indeed, you acknowledge the failure of your "viability" rationale: "It is true, though, that because of technological advances in the coming decade...
...YEARS BRITISH GOVERNMENT OFFIcials have repeated the message: The "mad-cow disease" that has killed thousands of British cattle over the past decade represents no danger to humans. Just last December Prime Minister John Major insisted that there was "no scientific evidence" that the fatal brain infection, called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), could be transmitted through beef products...