Word: sudden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year before. In 1989 twice as many 22-year-olds were flooding into the labor force. But Ceausescu was unable to create jobs in the late 1980s as rapidly as mothers created babies in the late 1960s. Revolutions are carried on the backs of the young, and the sudden increase of the always volatile 18-to-22-year-old age group destabilized Rumania even more dramatically than a similar surge of baby boomers disrupted American society in the late 1960s...
...much-wired planet. The idea of being able to throw your voice around the world and in a few seconds hit precisely the ear you wanted among all the globe's 10 billion ears has lost its capacity to surprise. But the telephone has strange powers. The sudden little Ice Age that descended upon AT&T last week may have given some Americans, in an almost subliminal way, a dose of the metaphysical spooks...
...think of the telephone purely as a secular voice thrower, it arrives in the mind at its most irritating. For example, no one has yet devised a pleasant way for a telephone to come to life. The ring is a sudden intrusion, a drill in the ear. Pavlov's dog hears and picks the damned thing up. The Satanic bleats from some new phones are the equivalent of sound lasers. Don't hurt me again, says the dog. I'll talk. Perhaps the phone that looks like a duck decoy and quacks instead of ring will breed new species -- phones...
...essential ungainliness is inescapable. It results partly from the pressing of technology against anatomy. The technosmooth circuitry is pushed bizarrely against the old Darwinian skull. The talker's being comes unfocused from the visual immediate room and refocuses -- through the ear! -- elsewhere. The Here communes with There through sudden activations of breath, vocal cords, jawbone, tongue, lips, eyes, emotions. Through the thing held to the ear, we hear voices from another world. We would be amazed by this spectacle if we were not so used...
...only natural that a red-blooded American who has repeatedly been called a wimp should derive a certain satisfaction from the sudden accusation that he is actually a bully. Hence the strutting, how-do-you-like-them-apples? comments coming from the White House just after the invasion of Panama...