Word: mania
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...weeks passed, Laradon Hall began to win a few small victories. It cured nine-year-old Billy of pyromania by letting him burn the rubbish each day, until gradually ("Aw, I don't wanna") he lost his interest in lighting fires. Another boy had a mania for stealing keys. So Mrs. Calabrese bought a whole batch of keys for Harold and gave him one whenever he deserved a reward. Now Harold has a pile of keys and has stopped stealing them...
...crowd of backbiters, miscreants, and dullards-who, it must be admitted, look pretty much like you and me without our clothes-a heavy lidded young man stood forth. He groped his way through the foils and foibles of mankind-occasionally being swept along in the mania of the moment, but more often standing back from the Crowd and muttering, "What am I doing here?" Clearly Dean had fallen ill with the dread "mal de siecle"-introspection...
Mystery Man. To grab Ebro, Juan March had to outwit and outfight a foe as powerful, mysterious and secretive as himself: Dannie N. (for Nusbaum) Heineman, who, at 78, looks startlingly like the late J. P. Morgan, has some of Morgan's mania for collecting (he owns a collection of original manuscripts of De Maupassant, Mozart and Goethe...
During the last year, Russia's ex post facto craving to lead the world in discoveries and inventions has reached the proportions of a national mania. Not content with claiming the airplane, telegraph, radio and electric light as Russian inventions, Soviet propagandists have been staking out their claims in every branch of the arts & sciences. Among the many Russian scientists who "were discussing" evolution long before Darwin, say the propagandists, was the 18th Century scholar, Mikhail Lomonosov. Scientist Lomonosov was quite a fellow; he also invented the helicopter and developed the theory of conservation of energy...
...Statesman and Nation's Sagittarius (Olga Katzin Miller) has written a dedication in verse ("Hedunit") to the hawk-nosed man in the deerstalker cap who "started a mania for singular cases, started a craving few addicts restrain, started a saga of amateur aces, whimsical, taciturn, dashing, urbane . . ." Holmes Addict Christopher Morley (see BOOKS), who helped found the Baker Street Irregulars in the U.S., contributed a satire on espionage in Washington and the atom bomb. Oldtime (80) shudder man Algernon Blackwood wrote a story of horror in a child's nursery that was reminiscent of The Turn...