Word: sharked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That probably wouldn't have happened last summer. A bad case of shark scare settled down on the country's beaches a couple of months ago when Jaws came out. But it's a funny kind of fear. It isn't just a shouting-fire-in-a crowded-theater kind of panic. It's more than beaches closing down, and lots of sweaty swimmers staying on grilled sands to the dismay of resort owners and confirmed bathers like William E. Buckley whose wife won't even go into the goddam swimming pool any more...
...simply another bogeyman that people love to fear, like the Red Scare and UFO's of the fifties. Although shark fever certainly has become a cult as some pendent entrepreneurs will swear to by the burgeoning market for shark's tooth pendants and spin-off products like posters, T-shirts and beach towels...
...different from a lot of other horror movies and an afternoon of adrenalin-whirling escape. The difference is that it can really happen. While skeptics could nervously laugh off The Exorcist because, after all, what civilized person really believes in demons, no sane person can doubt the reality of shark attacks...
...happen often. Unlike The towering Inferno, which might strike one building in the whole country in an entire year, shark attacks can hit an area five times in two months as they did in Florida this summer. The point is that the chances of getting gobbled up by a shark, however slim, are good enough to get a lot of people thinking it could happen to them...
...pretty exotic. Sharks have been around in basically the same form they are in now for about 63 million years. They have some mysterious soft staying power that bypassed their early contemporaries the dinosaurs and icthyosaurs. Yet no one knows how many types exist or how many attack humans. No one can predict for sure how they will belive in captivity, much less in their natural habitat. Or as one shark expert told Time. "Of course their actions are predictable." The problem is that "we are still so totally ignorant of shark behavior that...