Word: pious
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Langer also outlined the "polarization of attitutes among the population," as some people became fanatically pious engaging in flagellation, magic or witchcraft while others "gave themselves up to drunkeness and debauchery." He quoted a medieval source which spoke of "drunkards and whoremongers following their lasts with the sword of the pestilance hanging over them." Langer called this "the Boccacio effect, a common human reaction to the threat of impending death...
...created a chain of mountains. On the most sacred eastern end of the island, the gods erected the highest of Bali's mountains, the 10,308-foot volcano of Gunung Agung, regarded by the Balinese as "The Navel of the World." Halfway up the slope of Agung, the pious Balinese built the huge mother temple of Besakih, and every hundred years they have held a solemn rite there to rid the island of ghosts. Last week, in the midst of the once-a-century festival, Agung erupted with catastrophic fury...
...pious atrocity infuriated Voltaire, and he sent off a blizzard of letters demanding details. "Ah, monsters," he cried in a letter to the judges of Calas, "you owe it to men to account for the blood of men." In a fury compounded of old age, pessimism, anticlericalism and a passion for justice, he summoned the attention of all Europe to the case, until at last Louis XV reversed the verdict against the Calases and, in so doing, crippled with shame the official persecution of the Huguenots...
...Restoration England, a robustious culture surrounded the pious fortress of the church like a red satin garter on a maiden's thigh. Trapped inside the fortress all day, church composers slipped out at night to meet in taverns where, in naughty laughter, they celebrated secular gaiety by composing bawdy songs to one another. Now, three young singers who call themselves "The Catch Club" are running through a lighthearted repertory of the old songs, proving nicely that spicy jokes are almost ageless...
...deprived of a lover one night, she compensated by eating one of his letters. One man once favored by Lou, recounting the affair 50 years later, was still dazzled. "There was something terrifying about her embrace," he recalled; "elemental, archaic. She was completely amoral and yet very pious, a vampire and a child...