Word: pleasant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Pleasant surprises are nice, particularly if they apply to national disaster areas such as reading ability, and a "pleasant surprise" was just what Dr. J. Stanley Ahmann of the National Assessment of Educational Progress reported after he glanced over the results of his group's federally financed $15 million effort to test how well U.S. youngsters can read. There was some doubt, however, that the test was really testing. Consider, for example, this question for nine-year-olds: "Complete the sentence with the words that make the most sense: The boy wanted (a) a new ball (b) under dinner...
...aware all this was allecting me. With an appeased stomach, a regular salary, and work that is pleasant and socially useful, one doesn't sweat it so much. A lot of things can wait--including the revolution. I still wanted it, but with less subjective urgency maybe...
...barracks-style quarters, says Gerhardus van der Merwe, who is in charge of the project, are designed "to ensure that inmates will live and relax together under pleasant conditions" -and inmates is precisely the word. According to the government's plan, the twelve-building complex will provide accommodations (strictly segregated according to sex) for some 60,000 blacks, most of whom are married...
Crichton maintains credibility with a fine array of documentary props, including a page of real brain X rays. Ironically, the plot turns on a physiological mechanism that is somewhat fanciful. Harry becomes addicted to the shocks, which give him a pleasant electrical high. His brain, therefore, contrives to have more frequent fits in order to receive more titillating shocks. Eventually the psychomotor epilepsy overrides the blocking capacity of the electrodes and Harry becomes a computerized monster. By this time he has escaped from the hospital and is well into murder and mayhem, with assorted police and medical practitioners in confused...
...equally unspecific God. He manages to create a mood in time, but it has neither origins nor resolution. It is a mood of self-centered static despair. Taken in small doses, Berryman's despair is palatable, and the poems are individually very impressive for their not necessarily pleasant combination of craftsmanship and desperation...