European opera stages are full of such unspeakable acts nowadays, and they usually have no dramatic point.
The popular Latin acts nowadays may be Marc Anthony and Shakira, but judging by the crowd at Orchard Beach, old-time salsa and mambo still have an audience.
False confessions disappeared overnight and cases involving disputes over what was said in police stations, which happened in most trials before the 1984 act, are nowadays extremely rare.
The offending molar would be tied to a door knob with darning thread and the door slammed, in an act that would nowadays come under the umbrella term "child abuse".
The classification he himself gives involves acts that are nowadays not considered as part of a separate science: the mere act of uttering a word (the phatic act) or sentence is part of phonetics (or phonology) and only of marginal concern here.
There may have been a time when writing a song called "Pimp Juice" was an act of provocation, but nowadays, even mainstream listeners are likely to be more amused than repulsed.
I find it increasingly difficult to find people who will act the same way nowadays.
"Nowadays people act like sport is completely apolitical," says Egon Krenz, the last communist head of East Germany, whose leadership style earned him 6½ years in prison for manslaughter after the nation dissolved.
For instance, Fox regularly buys print advertising for themselves in newspapers and trade publications, yet I've never heard of a Fox ad being rejected because readers might confuse the network with actual news (they act more like a PAC nowadays).
Once-marginal, now-legendary "seminal" acts reform all the time nowadays, but last summer, when two of the four original members of the Replacements got back together to play their first shows since 1991, it was hard to begrudge them a chance to grab some of the attention (and ticket sales) they missed out on the first time round.
