Word: refrain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...warriors, their oiled bodies gleaming, danced and chanted, "Yao, yao, we abide, we abide, what was foretold has come to pass." Bells, gongs, metal castanets and deep-throated fontomfroms took up the refrain, then fell to a deep hush as the palace gates swung open. Walking majestically, the new King-or Asantehene-led the procession of sword-carrying royal guards, drummers, musketeers, elephant horn blowers, buglers and slaves. Because the King's person may never touch bare earth, his chamberlains chanted, "Walk slowly, my lord, watch that puddle, beware of the stone, walk slowly, my lord...
...like Joan Didion, you can count on her. Three pages into her new novel, the heroine says: "I am telling you how it was." That is the true Didion refrain. Whether in novels or essays, she is always trying to tell the way it is, always indicating the current physical and emotional temperature-it is usually over 100° outside and the climate of the soul is a parched desert...
...make sure a weight lifter's blood pressure is not continuously at an abnormally high level. If it is, he says, the patient should be forbidden to do any weight lifting. Other physicians agree with Breall and suggest that anyone with a tendency to high blood pressure should refrain from any form of isometrics, or static exercise, and consider instead such rhythmic exercises as swimming or jogging, which are preferable for the heart and circulatory system...
...Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin were not embarked upon a campaign of selective repression against intellectual dissidents. In the wake of arrests and harassment of outstanding writers, scientists and civil libertarians, some Russians fear, the more favorable official view of Stalin will lessen the pressures on the government to refrain from the harsh practices that so severely scarred his 27-year rule of Russia...
...that's not the whole problem. Any move we make against them brings 300,000 Palestinian refugees out of their camps and down on our necks. Most of them are armed, and we cannot cope with them and with the commandos." That was becoming a sadly familiar refrain in the tormented Middle East...