Word: shriekings
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Then it came -- the shriek of a siren so loud it silenced even the crowd's mocking roar. Arthur reacted like so many others: he turned into a rock. His eyes glazed, his mouth opened, his hand gripping the microphone like a cigar- store Indian, the young man needed a jolt to make his feet carry him to safety. In the wings, Cooper shrugged. Since his siren had not worked, he had no choice but to send in the clown...
...everybody likes the monkey house. The chimps clutch the bars and make faces; the orangutans lounge obscenely and scratch their hairy orange arms. With ape-like gestures, the cast members of the Mainstage production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade shriek, jabber and carry on. As the inmates of the asylum of Charenton, they perform a play within a play. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat, written by one of their own number, the Marquis de Sade...
...solitary on stage, stands staring through a piece of rectangular plastic, a small, open circle rounded by red at its center. He falls backward, rigid, his body hitting the ground so hard it raises clouds of dust and makes a sound like a dull detonation. A siren starts to shriek. It could be a warning, or a summons...
...What Rocks!" the Hoya fans shriek, "What Rocks!" This is the literal translation of the school's motto, "Hoya Saxa." The people in Henle 20 with the Harvard student didn't shriek that, or much of anything, until the second half of Saturday's game. What did it was an inbound pass by Gene Smith, accompanied by a grim and an unmistaka- ble nationally televised wink right into the cumeras...
Some sentimentalists, of course, think of heckling as a democratic dialogue, a roughhewn give-and-take of language. But it can turn strident and ultimately sinister. The shriek from the floor can become a different medium altogether. It turns into street theater. Anarchy crashes the hall, like a motorcycle leaping through the window and blasting down the aisle toward the podium. The sound is an anti-language, a gust of obliterating noise from below that is designed precisely to subvert the process whereby words arrive as ideas at their destination in people's brains...