Word: mania
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Mountains are self-consciously rural, but nearly all are good. Some are simple drawls picked up around the place-a pig that sucked cows and escaped butchery for a vaudeville career, a 14-year courtship trustrated by moonshine, an unbeatable corn-hoer who had a mania for stealing brass. Others are extravagant part-inventions: a politician who uses both wings of a feud to win an election; a sad comedy about a one-eyed man whose girl two-timed him. Some of the best are merely rich descriptions of farm work masterful records of the quiet talk that runs over...
...breeding horses. Every summer, Breeder Haggin used to ship 300 thoroughbreds to the Saratoga yearling sales. When public indignation against gambling outlawed racing in California, its stud farms went to rack & ruin. With racing's revival in 1935, thoroughbred breeding became more than an industry, it became a mania...
...faults are obvious. ... I suffer from cacoëthes loquendi, a mania or itch for talking. . . . But there never has been superadded to these vices of mine the withering, embalming vice of consistency. . . . Let me quote Emerson: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen...
...Cyclops (Paramount) recounts, with a slight flavor of sadism, what goes on when a shave-pate, myopic, six-foot-two scientist (Albert Dekker) acquires an up-to-date laboratory in the Amazon jungles and a mania for reducing human beings (by radium treatment) to a height of some 13 inches. Victims of this scientific zeal are Dr. Cyclops' nosy colleagues (Janice Logan, Thomas Coley, Charles Halton, Victor Kilian...