Word: habitable
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...catches his audience off-guard. He offers a solution to the population problem--impose the death penalty for parking violations. He tells the audience what to do in uncomfortable situations. When someone asks you if you mind him smoking, simply reply, "No, mind if I fart? It's a habit I have...
...This habit of skipping past the physical toward the philosophical makes The City Builder an altogether less-urgent narrative than The Case Worker. The bureaucrat hero has evidently led an interesting, if calamitous life, but he strews the details so negligently through his thoughts that only the most vigilant reader can piece them together. Konrád tries to atone for such cold impersonality by giving his builder a warm, strenuously rhetorical prose style (gracefully rendered by Translator Ivan Sanders). The effect is often striking. Konrád's metaphors can go off like depth charges: "Marble-faced generals...
...that you can become overorganized and start getting answers and information that you don't really need. It's something we fight all the time." For Harrah, a quiet ex-Californian who owns 84% of the company's stock, fussing over minutiae is a hard habit to break after 40 years. Recently he ordered a hotel restaurant billboard repainted after noticing that the rack-of-lamb dinner on it "looked raw." At 66, though, Harrah has begun delegating more decision making to subordinates. A close friend of many show-business celebrities, he still helps set entertainment policy...
Therapists also differ widely about how the condition should be treated. The most common technique is behavior modification; its use is based on the assumption that agoraphobia is a habit to be broken. Treatment consists of gradually exposing the phobic patient to feared sit uations, first by having him imagine them, then by forcing him, for instance, to take longer and longer solo walks until the stress disappears. A more drastic technique, similar to throwing a baby into a pool to teach it how to swim, is known as "implosion"?a patient might be driven to a large empty...
...times carried out in a clumsy fashion. Short Eyes's mea culpa about his perverse affinity for young girls is riddled with cliches, and Davison's acting in the title role approaches the pedestrian throughout the narrative, making the character look like just another wimp with a kinky habit...