Word: vermin
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...Nazi propaganda machine was infamous for portraying Jews as vermin who had infested Europe. I take the greatest offense to Klein's reference to Jewish communities, "settlements," situated over the Green Line as "an infestation that most Palestinians, rightly, consider a continuous invasion of their land." His opinion of their legality is a separate issue, but his choice of language is debasing and dehumanizing. Ardie Geldman, EFRAT, ISRAEL
...hard to get too worked up about dust. Yes, it's a nuisance, but it's hardly one that causes us much anxiety - and our language itself suggests as much. We call those clumps of the stuff under the bed dust bunnies after all, not, say, dust vermin...
...vampire-as-vermin gets another workout in this weekend's Daybreakers, an imaginative but wanly executed effort from the German-born twins, Michael and Peter Spierig. They picture a near future in which a plague has turned 90% of the world into vampires. The upside: immortality. Then again, with the vast majority of the population now bloodsuckers, there's a significant shortage of bloodsuckees: the few remaining humans, most of whom are imprisoned and "farmed" in a vast, multi-tiered, Matrix-like abattoir where their blood is systematically drained. Still, it's not enough. As I learn from a fellow...
...Francis Coppola Dracula. It's the vampire as pure predator, a gaunt, subhuman pestilence, the ultimate parasite whose host is the rest of us. Nothing sexy about these creatures, or their act of feasting on our blood. They walk and talk like real people, but they're vermin: rats who drive humanity bats. (See 90 years of vampires on screen...
...them. With the book's end in sight, Byatt snatches the Wellwoods and their circle, who have been living in a kind of Midsummer Night's Dream - admittedly a delusional version, shot through with subplots involving abuse and incest - out of their fairy costumes and deposits them in the vermin-infested trenches and blood-soaked hospitals of World War I. In conveying the vicious indifference with which their lives are shattered, Byatt's penetrating, unsentimental style hits its mark. None of Olive's fairy tales could have foretold one son's ending: "He was dead by the time...