Word: dooming
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...days of Chile's popular government are numbered, I say that they can swallow their tongues." So recently declared Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens, the first Marxist head of state to win office through a free election. Nonetheless, wagging tongues inside and out of Chile continue to predict doom for Allende's 14-month-old Popular Unity coalition. Their predictions may be premature, but Chile's economic problems are steadily worsening, and the opposition forces of the Christian Democrats and the rightist National Party are increasing their attacks on Allende, whose popularity has fallen in recent weeks...
What brings these doom prognostications to the fore are two books which, the ads would have it, give us some of the best cultural criticism of our time. The first, Film 70-71, is a collection of reviews by the most quoted of movie reviewers, the members of the National Society of Film Critics, who write mainly for New York-based national magazines. The one big exception is Gary Arnold of The Washington Post. He's the first daily critic to make the membership list; as he's a Kael protege of some renown, I'd love to know...
Shakespeare's Thane is a man possessed by his own craving for power. He is destroyed by the evil within himself, not, as Polanski would have it, by witchly auguries of doom. Polanski is most at home dealing with black magic, and Macbeth's second meeting with the witches ("Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble . . .") is expanded into a veritable convention, with dozens of naked, withered old crones cackling and drooling all over themselves. It looks like a remnant of Rosemary's Baby. Polanski's affection for the supernatural is so unrestrained that many of the movie...
Rabbit knew the guy was half-crocked: "Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath." But a feeling of unease, of inevitable doom, sank into his gut, and he returned to Brewer. Finally disappointed by a mistress too scared to let Rabbit get through to her, and slightly stirred by the selfless (if misguided) urgings of an Episcopalian minister, he returned to his wife Janice as well...
...than William the Conqueror, showing how words have changed color through the ages. Before becoming a game, Badminton served variously as the name of an English country estate and a cooling drink. As late as 1848, "snoop" meant "to appropriate or consume dainties in a clandestine manner." The word doom was a synonym for statute until legal proceedings and human nature changed its meaning. Even though the microprinting can be read only with the accompanying magnifying glass, which makes for hard browsing, the whole O.E.D. in two volumes is the etymological buy of a decade...