Word: fin
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...begin with the tale of the fin, its rise and fall from the American car and the American Dream. The design staff at General Motors copied the first fins off a top-secret U.S. Air Force plane (the Lockheed P-38), quietly grafting them as little bumps on the rear of the 1948 Cadillac. The next year's model was a best seller, and as the 1950s progressed, the fins proliferated. They appeared on Oldsmobiles, on Buicks, on Chryslers, with Fords finally sprouting them in 1957. The fins, fickle as Paris hemlines, grew wide and high, rising...
Rosenblatt's article was good, but I hardly believe that in 1997 people were driven by "apocalyptic, fin-de-siecle anxieties about the approaching millennium." It is true that people get touchy when encountering the finale of a century, and even more so at the end of a millennium, but violence, insane mass hysteria, suicides, murders and a highly emotional society are not produced by the end of a period of time; they lie in human nature. JANET M. BOLLERO Rosario, Argentina...
What was it about this particular year that had so many people running in hysterical packs? Were these mass demonstrations brought on by apocalyptic, fin-de-siecle anxieties about the approaching millennium? By a general frustration with emotional detachments that have characterized recent years? Or by suppressed feelings about other, hidden things that erupted geyser-like in reaction to the news...
...case, there seemed to be a strong current of national melancholy seeking to express itself. The economy was way up, the deficit skinny, unemployment and interest rates down; so it would be hard to argue that melancholy was linked to money. But the fin de siecle came at the same time as the "fin" of other things. An odd loss attended winning the cold war, that of a scary enemy (the effort to inflate Saddam Hussein to that stature was seen as nonsense). There was the apparent end of ideology as the two main political parties settled on common...
...growing pains. Banks have loaned too much money, using inflated property values as collateral. In Thailand many banks have loaned more money than they have on deposit, and some 20% of the nation's lending has been done by especially aggressive, largely unregulated nonbank financial companies. Most of these "fin-cos" are headed for extinction. It's a recipe for a flood of bad loans and higher interest rates. The economy there is headed for a slowdown, possibly a recession, in short order...