Word: vitus
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...mania was called St. Vitus's dance because a visit to the saint's chapel sometimes worked a cure. The modern medical name for it is tarantism, after the wild Italian folk dance, the tarantella. The Italians have a common belief that the tarantella drives out the poison of a tarantula's bite by causing perspiration, and that the dance was named for the spider. Actually, both dance and spider were named for the city of Taranto, which was hit hard by the dancing mania...
...effects of the Black Death* had not yet subsided, and the graves of millions of its victims were scarcely closed, when a strange delusion arose in Germany . . . and excited the astonishment of contemporaries for more than two centuries. . . . It was called the dance of St. John or of St. Vitus, on account of the Bacchantic leaps by which it was characterized, and which gave to those affected, whilst performing their wild dance, and screaming and foaming with fury, all the appearance of persons possessed...
...ginger ale. Shouted he: "All things that are sweet and reasonable and Christian are being more and more jeered at and flouted. . . . We know that art and literature have been befouled. ... In literature every man is a cad and every woman a vamp. . . . We have the devotees of St. Vitus' dance called Jazz . . . volplaning down the descending scale. You hear crooners breaking their hearts every night-if anybody broke their necks I should not be sorry. . . . London is the playground of the idle rich. ... All this technique of sapping and mining the morale of our people ... is Fifth Column...
...divorcing habits, his "I-can-take-it creed." Of the touted U. S. vitality he remarks: "No one was ever less of a born go-getter than the American. He is almost saurian in his sloth." Nervous instability is quite another matter: "I have never seen so much St. Vitus dance as since I've been here." For some years Wyndham Lewis has been one of the toughest, most provocative satirists alive. It is something of a tribute to the deep hold England has on her sons that in this book he plays several skillfully muted patriotic solos, better...
...listener, used to hearing four-four tempos from marches and other dance tunes, to remember that tempo; then from the very beginning of the record, the band proceeded to play ahead of this implied beat. Push, push, push, till the record sounds like a pile driver with St. Vitus dance. Drive is the whole object of this style of playing...