Word: groanings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nobody needs to be told what to hate about this year, what made us flinch or groan, change the channel, fling the magazine across the room. Generations of scholars yet unborn will read shelves of books yet unwritten trying to figure out what went wrong in America in 1998 and why. So maybe it's the lazy luxury of relief, now that it's over, to look at what might have gone right and toast the new era with a glass half full...
...quiet. Seven minutes go by-more people still. The spotlights turn on; the P.A. system warms up, and the room buzzes with ambient sound. At 10 minutes, hundreds of rustling papers and chitchat fill the room with ugly, roaring noise, overwhelming the quiet plaint of the antique benches that groan under the load of bodies. Sanders swarms; handouts and slow-movers clog the main door causing backflow into Memorial Hall. The room's air, warm and moist, smells of Chickwich. The Harvard monster-size class begins...
When the delivery guys drop stacks of the latest CD-ROMs in my office each day, my first reaction is usually a groan. It's hard to get excited about the latest Barbie disc or Wheel of Fortune for the PC. But last week, after I checked out Encarta Africana, a two-disc, multimedia reference work by Microsoft on the history and culture of Africa and people of African descent, I wanted to kiss the FedEx guy. This remarkable new work blends old-fashioned scholarship and storytelling with color videos and stereo sound to bring its subject alive, starting with...
...WORST Peepee Poopoo! Movies have been regressing for ages, but this year they went totally infantile. How many potty jokes can you stuff into a shrill "kids'" film like Doctor Dolittle or Rugrats? Enough to make toddlers giggle, parents groan and critics fret about the millennial devolution of cinema...
...running modern philosophical commentary by the articulate and learned Calasso ("Is there any part of literary history Calasso isn't familiar with?", you may ask yourself by the end of this book) on the bizarre and sometimes grotesque events of the stories. Two birds are killed with one tome (groan), in a sense: on the one hand there is the excitement of these ancient and unusual non-Western tales; on the other hand, there is that intriguing way of approaching the tales that a Western end-of-the-millenium audience can't help but love...