Word: figment
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Most of these signs--what the South Africans call "petty apartheid"--have been removed in the last few years, as white South Africa tries hard to give its drooping image a facelift. But enough remains to remind you that apartheid exists, that it is not a figment of some fevered radical's exaggeration, that beneath Pretoria's familiar exterior there is something very wrong indeed...
...horse's head--now what do you make of that? Yet, beneath the surface of his painted world, seemingly defying nature as the sciences explain it, there is a vitality that belies the cavalier neglect of "realistic" technique. The "Bacchante" dancing beneath a red rainbow may be a figment of Chagall's imagination but she has amazing verve...
This last consideration, of course, is especially appropriate during reading period, when intramurals rage on as if exams were just a figment of some admissions officer's imagination...
...newsmen and occultists descend upon the miracle worker, Maloney tests his vision. Is it fact or figment? He attempts, mentally, to remove a single item. Suddenly its underside is marked MADE IN JAPAN. The scholar becomes a prisoner of his obsession, forced to preserve the dream by repeating it every night. But reality is inexorable. Restaurants and boutiques spring up around collection and collector: the Florence Nightingale Tearoom, the Oscar Wilde Way Out. Spectators come to gawk at the thinker, not the thought; finally even the erotic kinks are removed by relentless commercial vulgarity...
...political writer from a generation that provided no large community of political artists. Swados published his first novel in 1955, when the Cold War was at its iciest, the United States was prosperous, and middle-class and professional people could be told that the working class was a figment of Communist propagandists' imaginations. In the 1930s, when large chunks of the middle class most writers came from and wrote for had joined most workers in protesting Depression hardship, opposing fascism and supporting the New Deal, many writers had moved Left. If they stayed there in the '50s they found themselves...