Word: comforts
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...grain, its amazing capacity to nourish life. But Americans have always needed to know the point of it all; that has been part of their peculiar national "innocence" and residual Puritan sense of themselves as the new elect of God. Without such grace or rationale, without the comfort of their demonstrable virtue and uniqueness, Americans feel themselves sliding toward triviality, and beyond that, toward an abyss that might swal low the whole experiment like a black hole. "Either America is the hope of the world," one dogmatically friendly French man wrote 20 years ago, "or it is nothing...
...weathercasts really necessary? Not absolutely. But in a nation of highly mobile and widely scattered people, it is both a comfort and a convenience to see the national weather satellite pictures, to watch the migrant storms and bright patches mar bling the land, and know just what kind of weather friends and family are under. An intelligent forecast enables people to plan their lives a little, instead of passively awaiting the atmosphere's surprises. Foreknowledge mitigates the tyranny of nature...
Complainers lace their speech with "always" and "never," and usually insist on sitting down before detailing their gripes-the fellow who complains standing up wants action, but the sitter wants to whine in comfort. It is a serious mistake either to agree or disagree with complainers. Instead, says Bramson, paraphrase the whiners' complaints back to them with "limiting concrete statements that let them know you understand." Noncommittal but encouraging "urns" and "ahs" are helpful...
...scrupulous accounting of how they spend their allowances. Says Phil: "They can con me, but put it in writing. Then when the police call about pills or dope, then I'll know. I just want to know." Whatever the disposition of the kids' stipends, Spector can draw comfort from the knowledge that he has tapped back into the true rock spirit. End of the Century is a head start on a new decade, for Spector and the Ramones, a negotiable franchise on the future. -Jay Cocks
Impotent men have traditionally received cold comfort from their physicians. "It's all in your head," they are usually told before being shuttled off to psychologists and psychiatrists. Now comes a report in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association urging doctors to take a closer look at the patient's physical condition. Endocrinologist Richard Spark of Boston's Beth Israel Hospital writes that the problem in many cases is medical, not mental. Using sensitive radioimmunoassay techniques that can pick up infinitesimal levels of hormones in the blood, Dr. Spark and his team studied...