Word: prurient
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rich patina of history. Jews, Christians and Muslims, all "People of the Book," draw much of their faith from the same sources. Yet from the time of the Muslim conquests and the Crusades, West and Islam have confronted each other by turns in attitudes of incomprehension, greed, fanaticism, prurient interest, fear and loathing. The drama has lost none of its historic tension in the stagecraft of the Ayatullah Khomeini. "This is not a struggle between the United States and Iran," he has told the faithful. "It is a struggle between Islam and the infidel." At such moments, the Imam takes...
Author Pikul's suggestion that the empress slept with Rasputin, for which there is no basis in fact, seems designed merely to appeal to the prurient interests of the proletariat. So do passages alluding to Rasputin's vast sexual appetite and his zest for orgies-which have been amply documented by historians. But the book seemingly has other and more unsavory functions. One is to encourage the xenophobia that still has a strong hold on the many Russian chauvinists in the elite, who believe that alien forces have caused their homeland's troubles down through the ages...
...book that will not only be appreciated but even read multiple times. Then take this year's sure fire suggestion. Which is the same as last year's sure fire suggestion and the one the year before that: to wit, a sex manual. Now you may think these are prurient and dumb, or you might think they are useful. Either way, it makes a great joke under the tree...
Jaws II, The Swarm, and Grease--Our sources also tell us that these three films, none of which have any redeeming value (or even prurient interest) of their own, are being combined by a Hollywood genius. The plot? Simple--a gang of singing, dancing bees takes on a gang of man-eating sharks wearing denim jackets and greased-back incisors for the rights to Laguna Beach. Or something like that...
...SICKNESS OF SOCIETY can be measured by the corruption of its words. If what is written is commercially compromised, pedestrian, pretentiously avant-garde, sensational, falsely "objective," full of prurient excitements, or given to half-truths in its ambitious and professional urge to suit popular taste, then the vigor and sanity of a people's intellectual life is indicted. No man or woman, still less a nation of millions, can escape the revealing honesty of personal utterance. So America, a land more than any other of printed words and raised voices, speaks a persistent, accusing dialogue with itself at every newsstand...