Word: referring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...language of euphemisms and code words. Some former prisoners report, for example, that at the notorious Sao Paulo torture center of the Brazilian political police, a torture session has been called a "spiritual seance," as if it involved a cleansing of impurities. Victims in Chile say that DINA interrogators refer to Santiago's infamous Villa Grimaldi as the Palacio de la Risa?the Palace of Laughter. In Iran, Otagh-e Tamshiyat, or "the room in which you make people walk," is a name for the blood-stained chamber where prisoners are forced to walk after torture to help their blood...
Torturers generally refer to themselves by nicknames, in part because they do not want their victims to know their real identities. Often the nicknames derive from a physical feature, such as "the Tall One," or "the Mustachioed One." In South America, such aliases as El Aleman (the German), Cara de Culebra (Snake Face) and El Carnicero (the Butcher) are common. One particularly brutal torturer at Chile's Tejas Verdes camp near San Antonio used to tell prisoners his name was Pata en la Raja, meaning Kick...
...objecting, as some do, to the archaic language that Miller has used to suggest the historical period and create a Brechtian distance between audience and player. The chief agents are the use of "Mister" to address the men and of "Goody" (colloquialism for "Goodwife") to refer to the women, along with a lot of unusual third-person verb forms ("He have his goodness now"). But one has only to compare The Crucible with Shaw's Saint Joan--another play that climaxes with confession, recantation and martyrdom--to see how much greater a master of language the Briton...
...night when he was pulling what he likes to refer to as "cold turkey" in Widener, Axel "overstudied" and, failing to hear the announcements of closing time, got locked inside the building. By the time Axel reached the fourth-floor checkout desk the library was completely dark and quiet; he could hear his heels clicking against the cold floor. Axel said he was scared but couldn't bring himself to call for help. "It was 21 years of conditioning versus my fears for survival." The fears won. An elderly janitor found Axel and let him out. Now the student still...
Harvard has repeatedly offered to refer cases of this nature to binding external arbitration, knowing full well that by doing so it would place the cases even further away from final resolution. The University prides itself on its internal grievance mechanism, but has repeatedly failed to clarify, or indeed, to rectify...