Word: jolts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Director Peter Hall, who has successfully directed Pinter and Shakespeare onstage, gives the action an occasional jolt of adrenaline. Ursula Andress, whose role seems to consist entirely of turning inusually nakedis easy on the eyes and, for once, also on the credulity. The man who steals the show, if not the bank's money, is David Warner of England's Royal Shakespeare Company, who swoops and camps around in the perfect comic caricature of the decadent nobleman...
Until the advent of the new laws, town officials had only two ways to jolt lax parents: by applying a Michigan statute holding them civilly liable for a minor's malicious damage up to $1,500, or making their children wards of the court. Neither method worked well, partly because officials were loath to punish middle-class parents. As a result, parents tended to be tolerant about offspring misbehavior. "Their attitude was that it's kid stuff," says Chief Richardson. "Now that attitude changes when the police say 'If it happens again...
...familiar politics of obscenity, it is taken for granted that speakers can jolt audiences with four-letter words. That notion may be premature. At the University of Utah last April, Black Militant Victor Gordon told the audience-students, local citizens, law-enforcement officials-that most Americans are too inhibited to utter the familiar earthy phrase that is a blunt description of a form of incest. Gordon invited the audience to join him in shouting the term at the count of three. With seemingly infantile glee, numerous people shouted away...
SWEDEN. The country is a model for feminist groups around the world. In order to prod husbands into encouraging wives to take a job, the tax laws have been rewritten so that next year married men will be taxed at the same rate as bachelors-a financial jolt to men with non-working wives. Stay-at-home wives are frowned on as "luxury housewives" by the ruling Social Democrats. Sweden's education system recently has been deliberately changed to eliminate the differences in the assumed "sex roles." Schoolboys do needlework and study homemaking, while the girls take courses...
...brocade of metaphors. Was that a rooster's crow? No, it was "the pickaxe voice of a cock, beginning to break up the night." Did it rain? No, "the heavens emptied their pots." Fry uses such figures of speech-more figures than speech-in an attempt to jolt his audience into a fresh recognition of commonplace truths...