Word: hokum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Christmas present dresses like Santa and quotes Diet Pepsi commercials, that doesn't keep him from making the eternal case for charity. If the ghost of Christmas past summons up not only old Fezziwig but also Tarzan and Little Orphan Annie, Frederick Douglass and the Washington Redskins, the hokum need not impinge on the message of choosing people over pelf, emotion over ambition...
Treacle like that goes down easier when the storytelling is as confident and plainspoken as it is here. Unlike, say, the recent mini-series Queen, Dr. Quinn is hokum without an agenda, other than re-creating some old-time TV pleasures. The town characters -- a naive telegraph operator, a good-hearted prostitute, a smoldering hunk who hangs out with a pet wolf -- are colorful in the innocent, pre-Bochco sense of the word, and the series has sweep and moral heft. (For the opening credits, the screen is even masked at the top and bottom to simulate a CinemaScope epic...
These measures gave the vote and other rights to citizens who had not enjoyed them before, though not, of course, to slaves or women. But the idea that the beginnings of democracy in Athens changed the way that rituals, gods and heroes were represented is hokum: exactly the same changes of style occurred in cities, like Olympia, that were run by tyrants. The fact that modern Greeks apparently want to believe it -- this being a time of superchauvinism in Greece, as in other Balkan countries -- means nothing, except in the scheme of simplistic politico-cultural fantasy. You might as well...
Amid all the hokum, however, the latest discoveries on actual details in the scrolls are startling enough to generate legitimate headlines. Texts that are only now becoming widely available establish the first connection between the scrolls and Jesus' New Testament words about his role as the Messiah. The debate over all the possible inthed material was mostly thousands of fragments, making reconstruction extremely difficult and interpretations open to dispute. Scholars on the official committee worked on these remaining texts at a painfully slow pace while granting others severely limited access. By the late 1980s, scholarly temperatures reached the boiling point...
Sports science undeniably contains some hype and hokum. Even its advocates are wary of excessive claims and complexity. Alois Mader, a professor at the German University of Sport Sciences in Cologne, points out that the highly successful Kenyan running program is as simple as can be. "It goes: run every day from youth on. And run so that you still enjoy it the next day. Everything else will follow automatically...