Word: maye
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Communist system. Furthermore, unlike other appeals that have borne the signatures of individuals, the Tallin document is signed by an organization that calls itself the Democrats of the Russian Federation, the Ukraine and Baltic Republics. The unusual nature of the document has, in fact, caused some suspicion that it may have been written by an anti-Communist group in Western Europe and then seized upon by the KGB as a pretext for cracking down on dissident elements. According to one account, the KGB has used the appeal to justify sweeping investigations not only in Tallin, but also in other places...
Even if the document is a fabrication, the scope of the investigation that it prompted suggests that the KGB is deeply worried about political dissent. If it is genuine-and it may well be-it would indicate a startling depth of protest, reaching even into the ranks of Russia's most elite naval force...
SILLY as this imaginary news dispatch may seem, it is not much sillier than the rumor, currently sweeping U.S. college campuses, that Paul McCartney is dead. As with most rumors, no one really knows its source. It has been variously traced to a thesis by an Ohio Wesleyan University student, a satirical but deadpan story in the Oct. 14 issue of the University of Michigan Daily, and a Detroit disk jockey who spread much the same nonsense over radio station WKNR. Since the rumor spread, Beatle fans have diligently parsed the albums of their heroes for clues corroborating what they...
...fulfilled by an age in which not only events but their meaning strain human understanding. Merely to live with the omnipotence of science and technology is enough to send man back to the safe harbor of primitive myth. Just as myth was the predecessor of science and religion, so may rumor have been the precursor of myth. Long before man registered his thoughts on the pages of history, he committed his anxieties and his faith to rumor-that welcome channel of information and misinformation that made sense of senselessness...
...trial balloons, rumors are deliberately lofted to survey popular sentiment. Before Gutenberg, word of mouth constituted man's principal means for exchanging knowledge, and it would be difficult to prove that modern instruments of communication have improved things much. If legend and myth are solidified rumor, so may be the printed picture and word-secondhand hearsay that is susceptible to the same kind of distortion that rumor undergoes in its journey from one willing ear to the next...