Word: pattern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...jurors who convicted MacDonald said later that the evidence at the scene did not jibe with his story. There was none of the defendant's blood in the living room where he said he was attacked, for instance, and FBI experts testified that the pattern and type of slashes in a pajama top did not fit MacDonald's account of the struggle. Defense Attorney Bernard Segal intends to appeal, partly on the ground that the long delay violated Mac-Donald's constitutional right to a speedy trial. The Kassabs professed not to be worried. Said Mildred Kassab...
...second model is the metaphor of natural decay, the seasons of human life, for example. Animals, people, have birth, growth, periods of vigor, then decline and death. Do societies obey that pattern? The idea of decadence, of course, implies exactly that. But it seems a risky metaphor. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, like the 14th century Berber Ibn-Khaldun and the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Vico, have constructed cyclical theories of civilizations that rise up in vigor, flourish, mature and then fall into decadence. Such theories may sometimes be too deterministic; they might well have failed, for example, to predict...
...could construct a kind of "worst-case scenario" to prove that the U.S., with the rest of the West, has fallen into dangerous decline. The case might be argued thus: the nation's pattern is moral and social failure, embellished by hedonism. The work ethic is nearly as dead as the Weimar Republic. Bureaucracies keep cloning themselves. Resources vanish. Education fails to educate. The system of justice collapses into a parody of justice. An underclass is trapped, half out of sight, while an opulent traffic passes overhead. Religion gives way to narcissistic self-improvement cults...
...exile with the departed dictator, the junta has resorted to unusual tactics to recruit civil servants. "I called every friend in my telephone book until I had a staff," one harried official told TIME Correspondent Roberto Suro. To ensure that the bureaucracy does not fall back into the predatory pattern of the past, the junta enacted a tough anticorruption law that provides hefty fines for malfeasance. Says Ramirez: "A government official today can stick his foot in his mouth, but not his hand in the cookie...
...Bowles character jots down a "recipe for dissolving the impression of hideousness made by a thing: Fix the attention upon the given object or situation so that the various elements, all familiar, will regroup themselves. Frightfulness is never more than an unfamiliar pattern." Bowles may believe this, but his stories regularly do the reverse. They fix the attention on beauty and then suggest the frightfulness within. Pages from Cold Point, Bowles' best, eeriest tale, paints an idyllic Jamaican setting. But the narrator soon learns that his 16-year-old son is homosexual and has been cruising in dangerous native...