Word: fads
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...epidemic more than 5,000 people caught the disease and 844 of them died, whereas there were only six deaths among the 286 who had been inoculated. That was the first large-scale proof that inoculation was effective. As the treatment gained adherents, it became almost a fad. Fashionable ladies in Paris wore bonnets with spotted ribbons (to simulate the pox). Empress Catherine of Russia summoned an English doctor to inoculate her and her courtiers (for which she paid him a fee of ?10,000 plus ?2,000 for expenses, an annuity of ?500 for life, and a barony...
...fad came to London from Paris, where, as Horace Walpole says, "they walk about the streets in the rain with umbrellas to avoid putting on their hats." So whenever London coachmen see anyone using the device, they are apt to crack their whips and shout, "Frenchman!" Or sometimes, more elaborately, "Rain beau...
Remember Mickey Rivers running around doling out cheap shots like they were the latest fad or Carl Yastrzemski turning the clock back a few years or Jim (Goldfish) Hunter throwing a three hitter...
...17th novel, Author Peter De Vries, 56, again shows that he is more than a match for the absurdities of modern life. Give him the latest fad, the most flaccidly permissive excuse for current thought, and he will top it nearly every time. With-it Protestantism? De Vries offers a minister who does impressions of movie stars from the pulpit and later throws a brunch at the "Après Church." The new amorality? He comes up with a mother who boasts that her unmarried daughter is having "one of those no-fault pregnancies." The macho style in Washington politics...
...good news is that the happy-talk news fad is waning; many stations are cutting back on their corn. "It's only a style, and styles go out of style," says Sam Zelman, whose ABC station in Washington has recently hired a respected ' network reporter, David Schoumacher, as anchor man. But the bad news is that some stations have replaced happy talk with unhappy talk, tabloid-style, producing a constant trafficking in emotions, like closeups of people in pain being lifted into ambulances. This nightly distorted accumulation of police-beat misfortunes makes any city look like a disaster...