Word: idiot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...abridged on grounds, e.g., sacrilege, that no U.S. official is qualified to define, because no U.S. official can officially define what is sacred. Last week two other censors banned The Miracle on other grounds. Ohio took exception to the film for purely moral reasons. Citing the seduction of the idiot girl by a shepherd whom she believes to be her special saint, it called the picture "basically immorar' and charged it with condoning "indecent behavior." Chicago's police board of censors banned the film for a direct violation of law: a city ordinance designed to protect any religious...
Three months in this "model" home, he said, was sufficient to produce marked changes in the babies' personalities. He showed eight-month-old twin boys, one of whom was arrested at the three-month level of development, while his brother made the vague, meaningless gestures of an idiot. Even more striking was a 15-month-old girl who also had failed to progress beyond the normal three-month level; she shrank back in wild-eyed withdrawal when the doctor approached...
...able to retort: "Go round to the side, Madam, and you'll see that I am." When, enveloped in a vast cloak and toying with a swordstick, he sat his 300 pounds down to dream on a wayside bench, passers-by "either take me for the village idiot or for one of Harrod's delivery vans." He liked to believe that his life was "centric," though it struck most people as eccentric beyond belief. He would take a bath, step out, and then step in again, shouting angrily: "Dammit, I've been in here already!" He would...
...Example. In Munich, Germany, after a court ruled that his client was not slandered when called a "super-idiot," Lawyer Karl Meindl drew three months in jail and a 300-mark fine for contempt when he protested: "Does the Herr Judge hold it to be meaningless if I, on the basis of his decision, call him a 'super-idiot...
What was the mysterious madness? Pont-Saint-Esprit speculated that the village idiot had hexed Baker Briand's flour, that the flour had been packed in fertilizer sacks, that rats in the grain elevator had contaminated the flour. The police knew better. They had traced the flour back from Briand's bakeshop through the government-controlled flour depot to a mill near Poitiers, nearly 300 miles away...