Word: wrongness
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...year-olds use themselves in organizing their own experience," says Chen. For example, to demonstrate that sound consists of vibrations, Marc and Lisa play with a toy telephone made by stretching a string between two tin cans. Then the scene shifts to two cartoon characters who joke about dialing wrong numbers. To introduce gravity, 3-2-1 Contact skips the traditional account of Sir Isaac Newton and the falling apple and shows a Hollywood stunt man plummeting from a four-story building; sensibly, Marc refuses to follow...
...reverse. That is what Harold Pinter has done in depicting an adulterous love affair. It is over in the first of nine scenes, and it begins just before the curtain drops. This is a clever conceit. Pinter, as we have much past reason to know, cannot write a wrong line-or a dull pause. The key actors, Raul Julia, Blythe Banner and Roy Scheider, are marvels of professional finesse, and Peter Hall's direction is ticktock perfect in its precision...
...crisis are only two of the most ominous realities that eluded the visions of virtually every forecaster. Moreover, the failure was marked by far more than the understandable inability to foresee all the astonishments to come; many, perhaps most, of the positive projections also turned out to be dismally wrong. To mention only one, the twinkle-toed, bell-bottomed, bead-draped, mind-blown, laid-back Consciousness III that Charles Reich saw aborning in The Greening of America (1970) proved to be a huge bag of promises, or threats, or wind, that never quite got delivered...
...that the U.S. and Soviet Union would manage greater mutual restraint. A number of observers guessed that American society would move into a hard-to-define period of reflection, a time for "sorting out," as Columnist Joseph Kraft called it. Economists, in any thorough analysis, were not flatly wrong in projecting continued prosperity; there has been that in spite of the discombobulations of recession and soaring prices. But the cumulative forecasts of politicians, sociologists, philosophers, scientists and journalists, including some of those that found their way into this magazine, fell dismally short of even hinting at the actual shape...
...many guess so wrong about so much? There are a variety of answers, but disappointingly few illuminating ones from the forecasters. Professional analysts, enamored of their computers and software and printouts, tend to mutter and mumble about technical imperfections in their still young methodology. Many admit that they erred by simply extrapolating from the trends that seemed evident as the '60s decade ended. Translation: they predicted that the present would persist into the future. Says Boris Pushkarev, vice president of New York's Regional Plan Association: "It's easy to continue trend lines. It's hard...