Word: parkinsonian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...part of the brain. Because of this damage, the victims of parkinsonism suffer from many symptoms that become progressively more severe and disabling: an involuntary tremor or pill-rolling movement of the fingers, rigidity of major limb muscles, hasty gait, slurred speech and difficulty in moving and turning. A parkinsonian patient falls frequently, and he develops a forward-leaning posture to protect him against toppling over backward...
...those investigators is Social Psychologist Elliot Aronson of the University of Texas, who became interested in the law after suffering through a Parkinsonian procrastination of his own making: he took three desultory summer weeks to prepare a lecture that could have been written in three hours. Deciding to test the work-delaying proclivities of others, he divided a number of volunteer students into two groups. Those in one section were allowed five minutes to prepare a talk on the subject of smoking; the others were given 15 minutes for the job. Aronson then gave each group a new but similar...
...school milk program. Any plan to take milk away from the kiddies is not going to get very far in Congress. Johnson also trimmed his allowances for emergency disaster relief by $100 million on the theory that there will be fewer disasters in 1967, a kind of Parkinsonian precept that the number and gravity of disasters depend upon how much money will be available for alleviating them...
...Senate, which passed a bill establishing HUD by a vote of 57 to 33, opposition was predominantly Republican. The bill's aim, to coordinate 115-odd federal housing and urban development programs within a single department, seemed worthy enough. But for many critics it portended yet another Parkinsonian encroachment on community affairs. Objected Senate Republican Leader Everett Dirksen: "I never yet saw, when you set up a department that it didn't grow and proliferate. If we're ever going to put an end to this gargantuan growth of government, it will have to be done...
Baron von Novotny. The economy may be chronically short of workers, but it supports a Parkinsonian proliferation of officials. There are 29 "technical" specialists for every 100 production workers in industry as a whole; in some heavy-engineering plants, two out of three employees are "experts." Czech clerks dully obey detailed instructions that minutely specify every routine from stowing their rubber stamps to writing form letters with "psychologically effective opening and closing phrases...