Word: spread
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...decision involved the case of Gene Arline, who in 1979 was dismissed as a third-grade teacher after she suffered her third flare-up of tuberculosis symptoms in two years. The school board in Nassau County, Fla., said it feared she could spread the disease. Bitter "after what they did to me," Arline sued, arguing that she was protected by the 1973 federal Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination against the handicapped by recipients of federal funds. The trouble was that the law made no specific mention of contagious diseases...
...opinion. But it was AIDS patients who appeared to be the biggest winners, as the decision was a clear repudiation of the Justice Department's view on AIDS discrimination. The department had argued that an employer may discriminate against workers purely on the basis of fear that they could spread a disease, even if that fear is irrational. The court ruling mentions AIDS only in a footnote, in which it declines for now to decide whether carriers of the AIDS virus who do not actually have the disease might also be considered handicapped. But taken as a whole, the court...
Some stories voice new and realistic fears in coded form. A wild rumor that McDonald's was mixing earthworms into its hamburger meat spread across the U.S. as concern about junk food was rising. "The worm represented, on the one hand, the garbage food," says Kapferer, "and, on the other hand, the internal destruction that comes when you eat it. Far from being an aberration on the part of a bunch of crazies, this rumor was a cry of alarm...
Hearsay can bring psychic benefits to speaker and listener alike. A case in point is the false teacup story about President Nixon, which Kapferer says was spread by the official Chinese press. Instead of challenging the President, so the story goes, authorities arranged to have a performing magician pull the cup out of Nixon's briefcase and replace it with a cheap imitation. Kapferer thinks this rumor offered folk wisdom on how to deal with foreigners. "It showed the essential traits of the image the Chinese have of themselves," he explains, "the final victory of the resourceful Chinese over...
...been threatened by rumors are Proctor & Gamble (the notion that the company's moon-and-stars symbol was related to Satanism), a Belgian beer that had to ride out a phony report that it caused impotence, and France's margarine industry, the victim of gossip that the lower-price spread was full of dangerous contaminants. Kapferer thinks French housewives got behind the margarine rumor as an excuse to keep buying butter. One margarine company fought back with an ad slogan describing the story as the "rumor that costs you dearly...