Word: laughter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...shyly, the fat squaw hawks her woven baskets along the reservation highway, the dusty landscape littered with rusting cars, crumbling wickiups and bony cattle. In the bleak villages, the only signs of cheer are romping, round-faced children and the invariably dirty, crowded bar, noisy with the shouts and laughter of drunkenness...
...second month, the normal human infant breaks into its first smile. The expression is often considered a reflex action, but it soon becomes social, and in the fourth month develops into that explosive, exclusively human breath pattern called laughter. Laughter serves man well. It can relieve his anxiety and tension, pave the way to friendship and enable him to tolerate his own-and life's-absurdities. Laughter is vital in helping to define what is human: its absence is generally taken as a sign of grave psychic stress. Yet laughter itself has never been satisfactorily defined. "The laughable...
Nature and Culture. Most recently, the mystery has been explored by George B. Milner, a linguist at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In New Society magazine, Milner argues that laughter restores man's balance on his precarious tightrope trip through life. "Man is doomed," he writes, "to be a product of culture, but not to be wholly cultural; and to be a product of nature, but not to be wholly natural." Half civilized, half beast, man struggles endlessly to harmonize the conflicting poles of his being. Pulled too far in either direction, he instinctively recognizes...
...lady who wants to dress all cows, dogs and cats because she finds their natural state indecent," Milner says. "She is being too cultured. We laugh at cannibalism, on the other hand, because man is acting too much like an animal." Yet there are other forms of laughter that do not fit Milner's theory-the laugh of sheer physical or emotional exuberance, for instance...
Yesterday's Fashions. To Germany's great pessimistic philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, laughter was man's dauntless ally in the battle against "that strict, untiring, troublesome governess, Reason." Man laughs whenever he can get the best of her, as in nonsense jokes, or when he finds connections that reason would surely forbid. The witticisms of Oscar Wilde nicely support the argument. After his imprisonment, for instance, Wilde said: "If this is the way the Queen treats her convicts, she doesn't deserve to have...