Word: tricking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Since Mather workers allowed Cobb only one entree on his first turn through the line, he employed the tried-and-true Harvard trick of dumping his left-over shrimp into an empty salad bowl before returning to the kitchen for seconds...
Exactly how it works remains mystifying. Doctors guide patients into a hypnotic state by having them focus on a particular mental image, a soothing voice or an object (yup, a swinging watch on a chain will do the trick). Once the patient is there, habitual patterns of thought are temporarily suspended. One theory is that the limbic system -- the brain region linked to emotion and involuntary responses like blood pressure -- is stimulated under hypnosis and rendered capable of reacting to external suggestions. An estimated 1 in 10 people, however, is not suggestible...
...trick of Doctorow's novel -- a meditation on '30s Mob boss Dutch Schultz -- was in its narrative voice. Young Billy, from Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx, was the ideal observer: a talisman for the gang, a kind of underworld groupie who is appreciative of their style and implicated in their actions but still one ironic step outside their souls, and who is ready to analyze every movement and moment in 484 pages of headlong streetwise orotundity and subordinate clauses even longer than this one. Tom Stoppard's script daringly dumps that voice (there is no voice-over narration) and puts...
Pete Dexter's eerie knack for placing himself inside the skin of even the minor players in his novels may be something like perfect pitch for a musician. It is a useful trick, done with no apparent effort -- in Dexter's case with no literary showiness whatsoever -- but by itself it does not make an artist. What deepens and darkens his writing, so that art is the precise word to describe it, is a powerful understanding that character rules, that we live with our weaknesses and die of our strengths...
...units will be "on the lookout for young trick-or-treaters, also old ones, too," Anderson said...