Word: hysteria
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When I first heard that I had been Quadded one year ago, I insisted on reading the card myself. Amid screams of hysteria, someone asked my blockmate, "Where are we living next year?" to which my goofy but perceptive friend responded, "Stanford." The prospects were not good...
...What failures loomed, none could say. Would the nightmare, to many tragically cruel, never end? As shades of Tuesday evening fell, it seemed again that the worst was past. Hysteria, it was hoped, had met its master in the Banking Power of the U.S." --Nov. 4, 1929, from coverage of the October stock-market crash...
...good, but I hardly believe that in 1997 people were driven by "apocalyptic, fin-de-siecle anxieties about the approaching millennium." It is true that people get touchy when encountering the finale of a century, and even more so at the end of a millennium, but violence, insane mass hysteria, suicides, murders and a highly emotional society are not produced by the end of a period of time; they lie in human nature. JANET M. BOLLERO Rosario, Argentina...
...crowd he at once becomes a blockhead." Schiller said that. Why does it happen? The "apocalypse now" theory has to do with the odd historical fact that people get exceptionally nervous as they near the end of any era. There were witch-hunts in the 1690s, episodes of hysteria in the 1890s. In our own time, one has only to reach back a couple of years to recall large-scale group fears induced by mention of the ozone layer, or by pandemics like toxic-shock syndrome, the Gulf War syndrome and the Ebola virus...
...alumnus/ae visiting Harvard two weeks ago and you picked up The Crimson, you would have thought you were looking at the Lampoon spoof issue. After all, Harvard students could not possibly have held candle-light vigils on the steps of Memorial Church in 1997 over grapes! Watching the grape hysteria, I couldn't help but think "what a falling-off was there." Were Harvard's "activists" really reduced to this? More to the point, were they really so unwilling to acknowledge good news...