Word: shock
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...basic rule surely ought to be: Measure what to believe by where you read it. You really can't demand reliability or balance about public affairs, only shock and cynicism and liveliness, in magazines whose editors are more skilled at judging acid-rock groups. Or in magazines whose editors primarily compete for the latest angle of audacity in photographing naked girls. Still, solemnity isn't the only test of good journalism: more conventional papers and magazines are often incurious about some kinds of news, while journals like Rolling Stone and the early Ramparts -in quite a different league...
Over and over, flip-flopping down, sideways, fishtailing-swandiving, Reggie Younging down down down. On your back, watching the sky and the two hawks seesawing on the updraft off the cliff, and the rude shock of the pool's liquid ice closing out the sky, and the clawing back up out of the water and up the trail. Nerves on millions of little trampolines, many falling off and breaking their necks. Tingles, rushes and fades...
Hence the shock and surprise when we find out that evil is being done by us or in our name. Hence, also, a kind of inverted pride, a mirror image of boosterism; if one side of the American chorus proclaims that the country is the best, the greatest ever or anywhere, the other side asserts that it is the worst ever, the worst anywhere. Both attitudes are equally false and provincial...
...Shock waves from the worst racial violence in South Africa's history (TIME, June 28) reverberated through that tense country last week. While heavily armed police stood guard around the smoldering ruins of Soweto-a satellite township for nearly 1 million blacks on the outskirts of Johannesburg-sporadic rioting broke out in neighboring ghettos and in black suburbs near Pretoria. In both cities, whites rushed to buy arms and ammunition for protection against the so-called swart gevaar (black peril) -although at no time were any white communities threatened...
...properties of hydrogen. Instead of testing what electric fish actually do, Cavendish attempted to duplicate their actions by creating an artificial ray and then passing an electric current through it from a battery of the devices known as Leyden phials. He constructed a fish out of wood, with the shock organs made of pewter, but he was dissatisfied with the results, partly because the artificial fish gave off weaker shocks when submerged under water. Cavendish's conclusion was cautious: "On the whole, I think there seems nothing in the phenomena of the torpedo at all incompatible with electricity...