Word: freakish
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shell of restrictions and convention, out of the pervasive boredom and the stifling despair, out of the painful marital situations and the endemic social falsity, into what they take to be a vibrant and desirable life." Kepesh, a randy academic, discovered his freakish freedom in The Breast, a tale about a man who turned into a mammary gland...
...freakish spate of global bad weather could be ending
Modern man's awe of nature has pretty much atrophied. Primitive man stood in still wonder in the presence of the seamless order of the elements and took violent fissures of that order as omens of supernatural wrath. Today such disasters are rationalized as freakish accidents, not as shattering revelations of immutable forces that man may never tame...
Abolitionists hope so, anyway. They are now arguing a subtle paradox. The prudence and selectivity required by the court, they say, means that executions will be carried out only rarely, and thus will remain arbitrary and freakish, a sort of death lottery. There is always caprice along the way to death row. Prosecutors have great leeway in deciding which homicides to try as capital murders. A killer can be persuaded to testify against an accomplice to save his own life. Brooks was convicted and executed; for the same murder his partner must serve only eight more years in prison...
Still, abolitionists like Kendall argue that because of the care and caution required by the Supreme Court, the death penalty is likely to be applied very rarely and thus will always appear arbitrary and freakish. "After a long and complex legal process," says Columbia's Edgar, the handful of people executed are basically no more deserving of death than "the great mass of those who committed comparable crimes and do not get executed...