Word: numb
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...Cool v. Numb...
...circuits. Even when he is strolling down the street, minding his own business, his poor brain jerks under the impact of instructions (WALK-DON'T WALK), threats (TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED), and newsstand alarms (PLANE CRASH AT TEL AVIV). Finally, Le Clézio's Everyman goes numb-nature's last defense. Spoken words become mere sounds, a meaningless buzz in the ears. The most urgent printed words-a poem by Baudelaire, a proclamation of war-have no more profound effect than the advice he reads (without really reading) on a book of matches: PLEASE CLOSE COVER...
...culture sprang more than anything else from rock-'n'-roll music. The new awareness took its energy from the shattering, obliterating volume of electrically amplified music, so awesomely loud it made pant legs flap and ears go numb for days. This volume, so enormous it was more movement than sound, amounted to a new form of violence, and when it coupled with the anarchic, brute-sexual rhythm and lyrics of rock-'n'-roll music, it produced a mass catharsis...
...great are the numbers that they numb: no mind can do the sums of individual anguish, privation and frustration that make up the whole. In Chicago, Welfare Director David L. Daniel says that the Cook County rolls will increase from 485,000 at the end of 1970 to 625,000 this year. In Newark, 25% of the population is getting aid, and Essex County Welfare Director Philip K. Lazaro says: "We are on the brink of financial disaster." In Los Angeles, the case load is now above 800,000 and rising by 10,000 to 15,000 a month...
Staggering Sight. By the time the government finishes counting the casualties, the great Ganges cyclone may rank as the worst natural disaster of the 20th century-and one of the worst of all recorded history. The figures transcend normal comprehension and numb the mind. Officially, the toll at the end of last week stood at 150,000; the only natural catastrophe to claim more lives in this century was the 1920 earthquake that killed 180,000 in Kansu, China. Yet the government concedes that its count is far from complete and that newspaper estimates...