Word: spastics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...when he was five the wordless, spastic child grabbed a piece of chalk in the toes of his left foot, and showed that he had control of one limb. Between confinements, his indomitable mother taught him the alphabet. When he was seven Christy spelled out MOTHER. It was one of the proudest moments that Christy Brown, now 22, reports in his autobiography, My Left Foot (Simon & Schuster; $3). From that moment, though unschooled, Christy went on to painting and writing stories, always with his left foot. Relying on that same limb, he had himself thrown into a canal...
...beginning his statement, Arthur Watkins referred to his "physical limitations," but said he would answer questions for "as long as I can stand here." Watkins has a spastic stomach condition, left by ulcers, which sometimes causes him to black out after being on his feet for long periods of time. McCarthy knew this-but he promptly made a typical McCarthy charge that Watkins was merely trying to avoid questions. (Over the weekend, McCarthy went to Wisconsin, where he accused Watkins of "cowardly conduct" for demanding that future questions be put in writing.) When McCarthy repeated his old charge that some...
Swing in the '30s put Chicago jazz into large bands with massed rhythms and careful arrangements. In the late '40s bop became briefly fashionable, with its air-splitting protests against swing stereotypes, but bop's own offbeat, spastic rhythms quickly palled. The jazz style called modern does not protest against anything very much except dullness. At its best, it swings as vigorously as any of its predecessors, but once it starts swinging, it seems to move on to more interesting matters, such as tinkering up a little canon à la Bach or some dissonant counterpoint...
...Bray has graduated to the nursery for children aged three to eight, and many of her former charges have graduated with her. For this older group she has organized rhythmic games (hand-clapping and singing). She has led a pitiful procession of the mentally lame, the halt and the spastic to the colony's canteen, a whole block and a half away, for a treat of ice cream. "We had never seen anything like that happen before," said a fellow worker. "Everyone talked about it for days...
...Psychiatrist Meduna claims to have a possible answer: a few sniffs of the gas which puts the bubbles in soda water. This, according to Dr. Meduna, may make psychoanalysis unnecessary. And, he contends, it is wonderfully effective for anxiety, inferiority complexes and homosexuality, or such psychosomatic complaints as spastic colon, frigidity, impotence and stuttering...