Word: hysterias
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...year 1692 was a very bad year for the town of Salem, Mass. During a summer of superstitious hysteria, grim events took place there that have permanently tarnished the popular American memory of its Puritan past. According to widely accepted tradition, the whole thing was whipped up by Cotton Mather and the lesser clergymen of a frowning theocracy. Before it was over, the story goes, 19 men and women were convicted and hanged as witches, and one man was pressed to death beneath large rocks for refusing to plead. The tradition holds that the executions were the result...
...concedes that most of those executed were clearly innocent, convicted on nothing more than "spectral evidence"-testimony that apparitions resembling the accused had tormented people-and the hysterical behavior of the teen-age girls who were the chief witnesses. Hansen notes that hysteria, as defined medically, can produce fits of supernormal violence, a vivid appearance that the sufferer is being choked, and psychosomatically induced "bite" and "pinch" marks on the skin. These were the main symptoms of the afflicted girls...
...ambassador, sitting in the place of honor at an Italian Cabinet meeting, hastily leaves to call the White House. Television stations switch to a documentary on flowers. Rich people call friends in the government in various stages of hysteria. The Pope is awakened, hands atwitch...
...teach; in barbarously slandering and abusing and shouting down those who disagree with you; in looting, stealing and defiling; in failing to see how much more complicated social problems are than you blindly assume; in acting out of an ignorance for which idealism is no excuse, and a hysteria for which youth is no defense. "Understanding"? You don't even understand that when you call me a "mother----" you are projecting your unresolved incestuous wishes onto me. The technical name for such projection, in advanced form, is paranoia...
...addition to superiority in performing conceptual cluster tricks on test sheets, the hard line segregationist is also vastly superior in his ability to bury qualifying phrases and demurrers and in his ability to distort and slant facts and batter his undereducated clientele into a complete state of hysteria where race is concerned...