Word: grating
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...black police chief, Zelma Wyche, 52, at first glance seems even more unpromising as an agent of amelioration. A Tallulah resident most of his life, he has been the town's most active and noisy agitator for racial justice. His attitudes have hardly altered in office. His mannerisms grate on white nerves. He hails white people by their first names, criticizes without a qualm Tallulah's white civic leadership and unabashedly seeks personal publicity...
There is something in the North Eastern ear which fights this kind of music. The higher frequencies, the tension created by the fast pace of fiddle and banjo, and the generally unsophisticated lyrics grate on ears unaccustomed to the sound. But in the past year or so, music from Nashville and the Southwest has become more popular. Johnny Cash and Dylan, Glen Campbell and Roger Miller have shown that there is a market even on rock radio stations for C and W songs. And, as with most kinds of music, the more you hear it, the more palatable it becomes...
...life processes: certain birds becoming extinct, hauls of inedible fish, mysterious animal sickness. Environment will tackle, for example, the effects of such forms of pollution as DDT pesticides and radioactive waste, chemical fertilizers and hot water from nuclear power reactors; it will explore the cacophony of modern noises that grate on the nerves and damage living organisms; it will contemplate festering cityscapes as well as blighted landscapes; it will examine the visual pollution of ugliness that defiles the esthetic spirit and stunts man's ability to live in peace and harmony with nature...
...need something morale-building like this, because my revolutionary fervor takes about half an hour longer than the rest of me to wake up." Arrested and riding to jail surrounded by deadly earnest radicals, Kunen busies himself trying "to work a cigarette butt through the window grate so that I can litter from a police bus." Whimsically, he records his dutiful trip to Washington in June "for the rich people's march in support of the Poor People's Campaign. You are supposed to come away from these affairs with a renewed commitment and a sense of purpose...
...clever ones call it "instant nostalgia," but others insist that it's just junk. The quest for the artifacts of yesteryear, which has been indulged in by many Americans for years, has now reached epidemic proportions. Behold! A hot-air grate, raised on a walnut stand, becomes "sculpture." A chamber pot leaves its place under the bed and appears-lo!-as a soup tureen. Fortunate is the man who inherits a 1912 Corona typewriter or an Atwater-Kent radio in plywood Gothic style. They are also lucky who have-squirreled away somewhere-cast-iron toys, lead molds, bubble...