Word: mania
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...earthling." Born in Terre Haute, Ind. of impoverished German parents, Theodore was one of 13 children. Late Songwriter Paul "On the Banks of the Wabash," "My Gal Sal" was the only one beside his younger brother to become famed. Franker than the average, Autobiographer Theodore tells of the religious mania of his father, the hell raising of his brothers, the amorous experiments of his sisters (whom he protects by pseudonyms). Himself very shy, young Theodore trembled when he first saw a girl in tights, but seems to have been in love with love as soon and as much as possible...
...spite of constant protests from prominent educators, the college degree mania is slow to weaken. Its futility seems obvious enough, but "the obvious" is not always considered. Popular illusions are often stubbornly held. Not until many more pages have been devoted to the explanation of the fact will it be realized that men who could never succeed in learning are quite likely to succeed in life...
...this mania of debunking, things which everyone knows are true, little thought has been given to the children. They have been robbed of fairies and Santa Claus and everything which makes life worth living. Now this thoughtless devastation of beliefs must stop. It has come to the point of destroying the very basis of art. What will Bohemia do, if obscurity is removed as a foundation of artistic achievement? Suppose art juries discover that dynamic symmetry may be dispensed with by a truly "original" artist...
Furthermore, these topics are not suitable to discussion in class. Curiously enough, they are all subjects on which many people have definite convictions which amount almost to a mania. In each section there are liable to be some such people. These turn the class from intelligent discussion to the expression of personal and often unsound views. All the time spent in this is practically wasted as far as learning economics is concerned...
...tiny whaling boat chasing a corporate phantom of monstrous, inhuman evil. All the work that a camera can do with great spaces and wild things is done, pictorially, as it should be. This Moby Dick is not a masterpiece. The concentration of the novel, the pressure of a mania growing until it makes the whale itself a Lilliputian thing, a mental cosine, is not managed, but Barrymore again makes a living character of Ahab. Triumphantly drunk, he swaggers through the wharfside brothels of the whaling town. There is a scene in which the stump of his bitten leg is seared...