Word: jolt
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...Wire watchers in newsrooms from coast to coast got a jolt one night last week when Associated Press printers broke into a bulletin on Apollo 16's blast-off from the moon with: "Listen, my children, and you shall hear/ Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere . . ."The Longfellow classic then lapsed into some blue doggerel dealing with Revere's sexual prowess. It turned out that an A.P. technician in New York, using the hoary rhyme to test what he thought was an in-house circuit, had inadvertently cut into the agency's "A" wire, the conduit...
Sometimes a face will swim up out of the gloom, pale, frightening and familiar--a star--and you are turned to stone before your own image. The jolt of recognition; it is not for him, but for that self of yours that he has incarnated, that large other you that has blazed up so often in the dark before your tiny, fascinated gaze. But most of the faces in the gloom are anonymous and alike in their intensity. Even the ones who seem idle, the dozens who, as you draw closer to the center of activity, you notice lounging...
...trouble is that the President is just as determined to ease up drastically after that period, producing what economists call a "stop-go"-or in this case, go-stop-fiscal program. In a fragile economy like the present one, every jolt caused by new stops or starts is an added risk. Nixon might have been better advised, election year or not, to even out new expenditures and spread them over a longer period. Indeed he may yet be forced to do just that. The sheer red tape of federal bookkeeping, check writing and the like may make it virtually impossible...
...much more troubled if this had been done by someone else. I don't believe in controls as an end in themselves or on a permanent basis. On the other hand, I am an activist?nobody believed that until this year. Being an activist, I felt we had to jolt the American economy on the inflation side...
...cold-blooded lie," he groans, "that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet . . . it came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it, yes! Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable." Grendel soon casts off this grim, comforting illusion. Thereafter John Gardner's own fable, by turns grisly, comic and curiously touching, follows Grendel's twelve-yearlong crusade against the Danes...