Word: frissons
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Whether pessimists or optimists, we are once again awed by the fin-de-siecle frisson. As Barbara Tuchman put it, people feel "as if the hand of God were turning a page in human fate." We have a sense of things ending and others beginning...
Armageddon is a serious game that any number can play. The electronic bulletin boards offered by such computer networks as CompuServe and Genie are stuffed with doomsday speculations. And one need not be born again to experience a frisson of apocalyptic concern. Also enjoying a new spasm of popularity is the 16th century astrologer Nostradamus, one of whose gnomic utterances predicts the arrival in 1999 of the "Great King of Terror" -- easily identifiable as Saddam, to those with vivid imaginations...
Haskell throws just enough tantrums to keep us from hating her perfection and offers observations at once trivial and absolutely true. She explains the bargain of married love: "We seek affection, closeness, intimacy, togetherness, a buffer against chaos, then wonder why we no longer experience the frisson of sexual longing." She fears she may become one of the women waiting in the halls who no longer have husbands "to consecrate the banalities of life, turn them into little miracles...
...ditties. In the case of Shakespeare, Levine cleverly demonstrates how well people knew the Bard's works by providing examples of the careful, complex parodies of Shakespeare's plays that were performed in the mid-19th century. The jokes evidence a public familiarity with Shakespeare that would send a frisson of joy through E.D. Hirsh and his many culturally literate disciples...
...Strouse has not had a hit since Annie (1977). Marvin Hamlisch's A Chorus Line is still strutting its stuff, but the show opened in 1975. Jerry Herman's 1983 cross- dressed love story La Cage aux Folles packed in the tourists, but its appeal came more from the frisson of seeing men in black lace and garter belts than from any of its songs...