Word: wheelings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...distance travel. Yet hardly a passenger escapes entirely from an ancient skepticism, a lurking suspicion that manned flight is somehow unnatural and inherently dangerous. The hazards are always magnified. Just as the Sunday driver tends to minimize the difficulties of the crowded highway because he himself is at the wheel, in control of his own destiny, the air traveler often exaggerates his peril. He has put the responsibility for his life into the hands of others-pilot, ground controllers, even weathermen-and his unease is understandable. When word of a crash hits the headlines, he inevitably asks himself the question...
...Editor Hayakawa chose a few acid words for acid heads. Wrote he: "Most people haven't learned to use the senses they possess. I not only hear music, I listen to it. I find the colors of the day such vivid experiences that I sometimes pound my steering wheel with excitement. And I say, why disorient your beautiful senses with drugs and poisons before you have half discovered what they...
...aborigines had invented neither the wheel nor the plow, nor had they imagined the whip. The same reproach had been felt before. The Tahitians had burst into tears when Cook had a thief flogged on the rigging of his ship. All these things have been written of before -Australia's natural history, Pacific exploration, and colonization. It is Moorehead's peculiar talent to keep the land, the natives and the newcomers in mind at the same time, so that what may have been regarded as mere event takes on the aspect of a moral drama. Historical journalism here...
...granting driver's licenses to obvious incompetents. In New York, Massachusetts, Maine and Wyoming, drug addicts and mental defectives can get licenses. In Kansas, one state official discovered not long ago that 10% of the people receiving aid-to-the-blind payments were licensed to take the wheel. Children of 14 can be licensed in many states; in Montana, some 13-year-olds are permitted to drive-although one study by New York State showed that drivers under 18 have an accident rate 70% higher than older ones. Most drivers are tested only once in a lifetime, under ideal...
...everything in the car flies forward at its original velocity, particularly the passengers. Like hammers striking nails, they ram into lethal little things: gearshift levers, air-conditioning ducts, ignition switches, chrome decorations on seats, glove compartments. One-fifth of the passenger fatalities result from being impaled by the steering wheel. The most dangerous place in the car is right next to the driver, the so-called death seat. Three-fifths of all passenger deaths are caused by striking the instrument panel, the roof, the windshield or its pillars, or being thrown from...