Word: unison
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...twenty to a hundred or more cute rodents. They feed them, pet them, train them, and give them cerebral lesions. Sometimes a rat bites a student, but the average rat is a pretty good egg. They sit up in humanoid poses, coyly cock their wee heads, and squeak in unison in the darkened cages. Millions of 'em. One gets out of his cage once in a while, and there are always several bandit rats (Independents) scampering around the floor and peeking out with one eye from behind the radiators and garbage cans. Nobody minds much, but once in a while...
...which artisans and farmers still knew from the Middle Ages, but which the musically literate upper classes had begun to scorn. In Boston the one-eyed crippled tanner, William Billings, was even bolder. He got the cello into church, and the much more needed pitch pipe. Against the ancient unison of the psalms he offered "fuges." For greater dissonance he recommended the braying of an ass, the filing of a saw, the squealing of a hog "who is extremely weak," the "cracking" of a crow, the howling of a dog, the squalling of a cat, "and what would grace...
Billings' songs took religious music back to "its prime source, the dance." His own prime source was balladry. He further disturbed a time when "the close spiritual identities that had produced the concentrations of unison were going or had gone." Miss Rourke calls him as great a democratic force as Shays's Rebellion...
...about to occur and a new world were to be born." Said he: "I suggest that while the protective forces are on the physical alert all other residents of Westchester declare a spiritual alert between the warning siren and the all-clear signal so that persons may, in solemn unison, lift up their hearts in prayer for the safety of our armed forces and civilians alike in a mighty plea for victory." In the area's surprise black-out this week, prayers will be led by clergy of all faiths over the local radio station...
...peoples exist by preference on a diet of hamburger steak." Still more reliable are freaks, the more nauseating the better. At Flushing their most stunning attractions were: a man who held up his socks with thumbtacks, another who could pop out his eyes like marbles, "either singly or in unison," another who lifted weights on hooks passed through his eyelids...