Word: hysteria
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Verging on Hysteria. The essays' editors charge that the reformers fatally gear their standards to "the unlucky, the ungifted, the indolent or the otherwise lame." This shrill voice is echoed in every essay. Tory M.P. Angus Maud writes: "We must reject the chimera of equality and proclaim the ideal of quality." Novelist Kingsley Amis encapsulates mass education with the slogan, "more means worse," and blames student unrest at universities on the presence of the academically unfit. Psychologist Sir Cyril Burt offers statistics purporting to prove that skills in reading, spelling and arithmetic have dropped in the past 55 years...
...three witches are historical figures: Anne de Chantraine, a peddler's moony daughter, is burned at 17 in Liège; Charles Poirot, a physician who falls in love with a monstrously pious lady invalid and is burned after she retreats from him into hysteria and screams that he has possessed her; Jeanne Harvilliers, a gypsy's granddaughter filled with loathing for the lead-souled villagers who come to her for love charms and poisons. The book's flat prose is curiously eloquent. "She was on the side of the executioners," the account says of a young...
...point where we can talk about the Weatherman action at the Center without hysteria. There are three things to say. The first is that no one should have been hurt. All of the arguments above are good only for violence against inanimate property. Violence to people can sometimes be justified. Those arguments, however, are much more complex. The N.L.F. is certainly justified in killing Americans. Their justification, however, comes from some combination of possibilities and a progressive view of history. The Vietnamese could no more have begun their revolution by hurting people than we can ours. As a rule...
...slopes. It was at St. Moritz that a roving Harper's Bazaar photographer encouraged his sartorial talent by asking to photograph some self-designed stretch ski pants that Pucci was wearing. Lord & Taylor saw the glossies and asked if they could manufacture the pants. The rest is hysteria. In the years that followed, Pucci became the champion of sportswear, the prince of prints and-an important clue to his success-the creator of designs recognizable even...
...portion, then mail back a check together with a note explaining what they have done and why. When paying utility bills, Matusow advises doing it promptly-but overpaying or underpaying by a penny or two. The effect, he says, is to send an unsophisticated computer into a state of hysteria...