Word: wilding
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MADAME RACAMIER, the elegant French hostess, must have expected some sort of unique, charming ingenu when she invited the wild boy of Aveyron to dinner at her chateau in 1801. Most of Parisian high society would be there, from the future king of Norway to Napoleon's valet de chambre. But of her guests Madame Racamier chose to seat beside her the thirteen-year-old wild boy (called Victor), anticipating an evening of compliments from this new talk of the town. Victor hardly obliged. After devouring his own meal (and part of hers as well), he burgled a dozen desserts...
...Harlan Lane points out in The Wild Boy of Aveyron, the child who grew up in the woods of central France entered a world of misconceptions when he surfaced in 1800. Philosophers expected him to fulfill Rousseau's ideal of the "Noble Savage," while a new breed of doctors eyed him for a test of behavior modification. So many ogling spectators filled the streets when Victor was first taken to Paris, in fact, that he became victor and began to bite the scores of outstretched hands...
Francois Truffaut's touching film, the Wild Child, has made the subsequent story well-known: a rising doctor, Jean-Marc Itard, took Victor in hand when other specialists gave up and tried unsuccessfully for five taxing years to teach the deaf-mute boy to use language. Apart from Itard's own account of his tribulations, no one has since returned to determine exactly why the wild child experiment failed. This is what Lane, a psychological from Northeastern, sets out to do. And beyond some amusing and touching anecdotes, he has produced much less a narrative history than a highly academic...
Ethiopia today seems caught between the chaos and tragic contrasts of trying to impose a socialist revolution, stitched together from Marxist-Leninist textbook ideology, onto an ancient and feudal land of almost bewitching beauty and vulnerability. The mountainside city of Addis Ababa itself reflects the dichotomy. Its haunting, wild setting amid mist-covered mountains, ancient stone paths and a profusion of roses and bougainvillaea is as timeless and unchanged as its poverty-stricken population, dressed in layers of worn, soiled clothing, sleeping in rag bundles on the sidewalks, and driving small flocks of donkeys and cows through the main streets...
Last week New York Yankee Lou Piniella slid into Boston Red Sox Catcher Carlton Fisk with enough force to trigger a wild on-field brawl-and bloody fights in the stands. One result: Pitcher Bill Lee was so severely hurt that he may be out for the rest of the season. At an Atlanta Braves-Houston Astros game, a controversial first-base call brought the entire Braves bench storming onto the field. The men in blue were forced to leave the stadium with other men in blue-a police escort. In perhaps the ugliest confrontation of this strange young season...