Word: unction
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...real life as well as in countless novels, plays and films, the arrival of a priest to administer the Roman Catholic sacrament of extreme unction has long had an ominous meaning: the patient was virtually given up for dead. Those whose condition was not in fact so grave could be given a nasty turn by the sight of the priest with his vial of holy oil. Now Pope Paul VI has changed all that. The sacrament, called "the anointing of the sick" since Vatican II, will hereafter be used not only for those who are in imminent danger of death...
...Play Strindberg, referring to his wife himself, marriage, life is general. That cheery thought illuminates the combat between Edgar, his failed actress of a wife Alice and a cousin Kurt who "coupled them up" 25 years ago, and now returns to contribute some of his banker's wealth and unction to the silver wedding anniversary Friedrich Durrenmatt's 1968 re-writing--or choreographing" as he terms it--of Strindberg's Dance of Death converts that play from a tragedy about marriage to a comedy about marriage tragedies and translates it into the terms of Brechtian "epic" theater...
...many U.S. cities, and few new U.S. hotels abroad match the grand luxe service of the best of the older foreign-owned hotels. But traveling Americans like U.S.-style hotels for their informality, speedy checkin, reliable phone service and fast meals. Europeans, who have been accustomed to more elegance, unction and haute cuisine, also seem to fancy the same American touches. Hilton's steakhouse in Paris to which beef is flown from the U.S. -is often so crowded with French patrons that hotel guests cannot get a table...
...shoes, winding knobs, leaning-all pointed at her like some mad animal . . . like a gun. All through a blue funk from glowing cigarettes. the faces are dark and there is a menacing murmuring. She had descended into the pit and her words rush out in a whisper of extreme unction...
These last two are of Lipton's own making--he insists the classifying shouldn't have ended in 1486. In a final and separate section of the book, he does his own inventing: a complex of psychoanalysts, a failing of students, an unction of undertakers (a larger group: an extreme unction), a rise of mini-skirts. He even outlines production rules: onomatopoeia, habitat, comment, etc. Always, the first term must pinpoint a feeling we have about the group being described. For instance, Lipton rules out calling prostitutes an anthology of pros, because the humor lies in the second term--anthology...