Word: line
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Joplin expressed one side of the year fairly well: ecstatic and self-destructive simultaneously, wailing to the edges of the universe, flirting with the abyss. Joplin, who died of a heroin overdose in 1970, memorably sang Me and Bobbie Magee, the 1969 Kris Kristofferson song that contained a perfect line of 1968 philosophy, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose...
Rowan and Martin's TV Laugh-In domesticated chaos into snippets. It flashed absurdities, like vaudeville on amphetamines -- Goldie Hawn dancing in body paint, Tiny Tim tiptoeing through the tulips. Laugh-In gave the nation "You bet your sweet bippy!" and "Sock it to me," a line that Republican Candidate Richard Nixon, among other celebrities, recited in three seconds of network time in September. (In deference to his dignity, Nixon was spared the customary dousing with a bucket of water.) The Rolling Stones snarled about the Street Fighting Man. Never before had an annus mirabilis transpired before the television cameras...
...During the Tet offensive in Saigon, the police chief's arm in profile that draws a straight line through his trigger finger and by the leap of the bullet into the fear-rigid Viet Cong's brain: a crisp extinction. The weird surprise of death, the pop into non-being. In the TV version, the man falls like a short tree and his head pours neat but urgent blood upon the street, as from a vial...
...Memphis motel balcony, blacks standing over a fallen black man, their faces abruptly up, and their fingers stabbing the air, indicting the air, along the line the shot had taken, as if the trajectory of their fingers' aim could bore back through the air to the assassin...
...Crimson's distraction was most obvious on the free throw line. It shot 1-for-8 in the first half and hit a total of only five shots in the game...