Word: phenomenon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some commentators on American behavior think that today's sporadic hoarding of gasoline is an isolated phenomenon unlikely to spread to other products. Says Sociologist Amitai Etzioni: "People have a very emotional stake in their cars. It's not rational and subject to the usual calculations." But others view it more seriously. Says Harvard Historian Frank Freidel: "Hoarding is an absolutely typical American trait...
Television drama-leaving aside the question of TV news, whose effects are a different phenomenon altogether-becomes more complicated when it is considered as a medium of persuasion, the little electronic proscenium alive with potentially sinister ideological glints. In years past, American TV has been considered a moderately conservative influence. From the suburban complacencies of Ozzie and Harriet through the vanquishing six-gun authority of Sheriff Matt Dillon, TV entertainment seemed an elaborate gloss on the status...
...tutorials, and most would agree that professors are the best possible tutorial leaders, but research commitments and understaffed departments make Faculty-taught tutorials a rare commodity. Bowersock notes that the '60s brought a flood of graduate students to the campus, and as a result, some Faculty members view the phenomenon of a professor-led tutorial as "an abnormal practice...
This may seem cold comfort to some, but it is not the only one that Thomas offers. Other happy refrains are sounded and resounded as the essays (averaging only 1,200 words long) tumble forth. He seems bemused by the phenomenon of healthy hypochondriacs. Americans, for example, are needlessly "obsessed with Health." Thomas wonders why, particularly at a time when "we are free of the great infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis and lobar pneumonia, which used to cut us down long be fore our time." Humans are not frail organisms coveted by every death-dealing microbe in the world...
Thomas' "error," a word he traces back to an old root meaning "to wander about, looking for something," occurred in 1970, when he put together a short, casual talk on the phenomenon of inflammation and what it might represent as a biological process. He delivered it at a symposium held at Upjohn Co.'s Brook Lodge in Michigan. A member of the audience passed a copy of the speech to Dr. Franz Joseph Ingelfinger, then the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Ingelfinger had already roiled the academic waters by warning potential contributors that medical research...