Word: hissing
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...Illinois Supreme Court has just ruled. The only issue is whether a witness is truthful. To be sure, said the court, the trial judge in the Alger Hiss case set an important precedent by permitting psychiatric testimony impeaching the credibility of Government Witness Whittaker Chambers. But that step is not necessary in all cases. "A psychopath," said the court, "has the capacity to observe, recollect and communicate, and is therefore a competent witness." If he is a liar, witnesses can testify that he has "a bad reputation for truth and veracity." After that, it is up to the jury...
...polytechnic, but the same optimistic cretin. In the person of Courtial, Celine pours all the vitriol of his prose on an age that believed science and progress would confer inestimable benefits upon mankind. Courtial's windy rhetoric on the subject of these benefits is mocked by the hiss of hot gases from his chronically punctured blimp. By the time the first great technological war breaks out, the point of Journey to the End of the Night has already been made: science has many unpleasant surprises as well as goodies in store...
...irony of the air-conditioner uproar is that, however unwanted the sound it makes on the outside, the hiss of air inside is just what the noise doctor ordered. Sound engineers refer to it as "white noise" or "acoustical perfume," and they use it widely, especially in offices, to blanket distracting sounds that spring out of silence into disconcerting acoustical relief. A too-silent Massachusetts Roman Catholic Church put in white noise to preserve the secrets of its confessionals...
...exodus of name singers, the Italian audiences can in part blame themselves. "They hiss or whistle too easily," says Soprano Mirella Freni. "I like a certain battle climate, but in Italy every evening is a graduation exam...
...1950s, Commentary became a leading exponent of so-called "liberal revisionism," an attempt to make liberal thought less dogmatic, more aware of life's evils, including Communism. In a searching revisionist essay, Critic Leslie Fiedler chided fellow liberals for flocking so thoughtlessly to the defense of Alger Hiss. "Certainly a generation was on trial with Hiss," he wrote, "on trial not, it must be noticed, for having struggled toward a better world, but for having substituted sentimentality for intelligence in that struggle...