Word: wreak
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...example, if he is called Uncle, a kind of saint. He is there, he endures, he will forgive us, and this is a key to that image. But if he is not Uncle, if he is merely Tom, he is a danger to everybody. He will wreak havoc on the countryside. When he is Uncle Tom, he has no sex?when he is Tom, he does?and this obviously says much more about the people who invented this myth than it does about the people who are the object of it." The Negro is thus penalized for "the guilty imagination...
Baldwin has understanding but little sympathy for the Black Muslim movement (TIME, Aug. 10, 1959) and its mystical leaders, who contend that "Allah" will wreak vengeance on the "white devil." Visiting the Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad in Chicago, Baldwin found himself wanting to defend his white friends. "I suddenly had a glimpse of what white people must go through at a dinner table when they are trying to prove that Negroes are not subhuman." When he left, he felt that he and Elijah "would always be strangers, and possibly, one day, enemies." The Muslim, fantasy of achieving power disturbed Baldwin...
...phonograph cartridge has the related but somewhat different task of converting wiggles in plastic into electrical signals approximating those originally made by the recoring engineer's mikes. While neither a speaker nor a microphone can harm the air it contacts in its attention to its duty, a cartridge can wreak havoc on its medium, the plastic of your records. Clearly, your choice of a cartridge will have a strong bearing on the satisfaction you receive from your home music system. The immediate factor of sound quality and the long range effect of record life will determine the grade you give...
...Buddhist monk among the crowd of petitioners gathered on his veranda, in return got a blast of four bullets in his body. He clung to life long enough to utter a last request. "I appeal to all concerned to show compassion to this man and not to try and wreak vengeance on him," he said, and died...
That an amateur orchestra should tackle Mahler would seem to swell ambition into hybris evoke awe but wreak disaster. And for it to invite so great an artist as Maureen Forrester would seem to make conceivable only nemesis or utter triumph. But the gods were sleepy Friday night; the thunderbolt never came. Neither catastrophe nor undreamed success came to the HRO: feeling flickered in the music now and again, sometimes brilliantly, but never consistently...