Word: spastics
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...mother's gentle "Come along" when the nurse summoned them. So did his attempts to talk. He was a victim of the athetoid type of cerebral palsy, marked by almost continual jerky movements that are worsened whenever the victim tries to execute the simplest task. (In the spastic type, equally common, any effort results in slow, jerky movements...
...possesses a liberal mind. I do not know if he possesses a mind. Yet it is obvious to me that his report of the Buckley lecture exemplified the same kind of inconsistency of which Mr. Buckley was concerned. Indeed, Mr. Gwirtzman might well deserve the title of "mental spastic," a phrase used by Mr. Buckley...
...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...