Word: manias
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...other hand, by sly understatement, his chipper account poked fun at officious "bashi-bazouks" like the camp Kommandant, and a corporal whose mania for counting and recounting the prisoners prompted one inmate to swear: "After this war is over. I am going to buy a German soldier and keep him in the garden and count him six times a day." Concluded Plum: "I would say that a prison is all right for a visit, but I wouldn't live there if you gave it to me." Bertie Wooster could hardly have put it better after a night...
...barbershop, where his mother, Leonor da Silva Quadros, the daughter of a small-time immigrant Argentine cattleman, tried to keep house, and where his pharmacist father, Gabriel, made life miserable for them both. Gabriel, says one of Quadros' close friends, "was abnormal-a real villain with a mania for women, displaying constant aggressiveness toward his son and wife." Pursued by bill collectors, the family flitted from town to town, until at 16 Jânio was finally allowed to settle in São Paulo. He took a year's course in education, started teaching part time...
...demented by the mania of owning things...
Assigned to a Cossack village, Davidov is soon packing a gun for protection and wrangling with his two assistants, one of whom stays up all night studying English while the other develops a mania for butchering the village cats to protect his pet pigeons...
Escaping detection on each occasion, the "Mad Buttoner" left further traces of mania in the form of notes in the proctor's room and on the office desk in the Freshman Union. The exam period frustration of the unknown malefactor apparently took the form of cryptic missives and verses on a theme of buttons. "Button, button, who's got the button" was a favorite...