Word: addictive
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...simplest acts are tense puzzlers, like finding his way to bed and then finding out who is in it. Acting the count, John soon realizes that the real count was fleeing a pack of emotional creditors whose hearts he had bankrupted. The count's mother is a morphine addict. His sister is a pious recluse who has not spoken to him for 15 years for unjustly killing her fiancé as a collaborationist. His brother, who dutifully manages the family glass foundry, has been cuckolded by the count. His neglected adolescent daughter has a bad outbreak of mystical acne...
...suspected of homosexuality into an introvert who didn't like sports. But the theme of The Man With the Golden Arm could not be twisted enough to fit inside the limits of the Old Code. As one wit put it, "You just can't make a dope addict into an off-beat character." The film was released without the Production Board seal of approval, and was financially successful, as were I Am a Camera and The Moon is Blue, also released without the seal...
...accountancy, medicine, especially psychiatry). They are often single (or if married, childless). They rarely play any musical instrument well themselves. The hi-fi devotee, Dr. Bowes found, "is very frequently of compulsive personality, and tends to go through rituals in the playing of his recordings." What distinguishes the psychopathological addict from the enthusiastic followers of this (or any other) hobby? Dr. Bowes answered: "His tendency to become preoccupied with, and dependent upon, the bizarre recorded sounds . . . combined with the urgency of the need and the final insufficiency of all attempts to satisfy it ... The sound is turned...
Those who are not well organized emotionally, said Dr. Bowes, "will treat their hi-fi set as the emotionally immature treat a car-as an expression of aggression, as a power symbol." To many it has a sexual connotation: addicts may be seeking a "sterile reproduction without biological bother," and in extreme cases, a record collection becomes a "symbolic harem." Significantly, says Psychiatrist Bowes (married, no children), an addict's wife almost always demands that the volume be turned down: "Perhaps in the male's interest in hi-fi she senses a rival, as shrill and discordant...
Using the Nalline test, Inspector Brau-moeller and Dr. Terry have achieved some spectacular results. Addict convictions in Oakland, they report, have risen from 29 in 1955 to 150 in the last eight months, and crimes largely attributed to addicts have declined...