Word: mania
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Last week, for the first time, the government took official note of the rumors. A presidential palace representative quietly asked the morning newspaper Clarin to publish a story reporting that "in the U.S. also there exists a mania for attributing bad health to [President] Eisenhower." The story pointed out that in both the U.S. and Great Britain there are constant rumors that Eisenhower and Churchill are sick, but these should be dismissed as the inventions of political enemies...
...Increase Mather's conscience worked slowly, it at least worked surely. All through the summer, with the witchcraft mania reaching new heights, his doubts began to grow. The earliest sign of his increasing distrust of the trial procedures came in the middle of June when, with several other ministers, he responded to a request for advice from the judges. The group of ministers suggested that the courts evaluate carefully the so-called "spectral evidence"--that given by the afflicted girls of Salem; no one was quite ready yet to dispute directly the testimony of the girls, but their conduct...
...witchcraft hysteria. Several weeks later, the court which had tried the Salem cases adjourned, never to sit again. No more executions took place in the colony of Massachusetts; the following spring, Governor Phips pardoned 150 people who had been imprisoned on witchcraft charges. The fury of the mania subsided as quickly as it had come, when Puritan good sense re-asserted itself. Soon the witchcraft trials were but an ugly memory, though Puritanism has never lost the stigma which the witch-hunts placed...
...mother, Danny is treated to more grim realism and the reader to Author Farrell's small-fry prose: "Danny didn't like it, seeing his new baby brother being fed at Mama's breasts . . . When he was a little baby he did that, got milk from Mania's breast. It almost made him mad. Why did God make it that way? It was like oysters. Oysters looked like milk that would make you maybe sick if you ate them. He couldn't look at oysters...
There are reasons for this mania to escape from an institution which is the pride and joy of other U.S. cities and towns. While school-age hoodlums are the small minority of students in New York, their precocious propensity for vandalism, gang "rumbles." narcotics, sex orgies and extortion make them an eternal menace in many a school. Even in quieter districts, the public-school child is still gulped up by the world's most enormous* -and in many ways its most faceless and impersonal-educational system. He becomes simply one by this autumn's figures...