Sentence examples for terror of words from inspiring English sources
Powers voices variations on a Philip K Dick theme: "To train our circus animal in Faulkner or Thomas Gray, we would first have to exhilarate it with the terror of words.
Some of the early manifestos reach for extremes of pleasure or suffering — "excruciation" and "terror" became words of praise.
Perhaps once Clare Torry's improvised vocal on The Great Gig in the Sky spoke to listeners of terror beyond words, but these days, it's simply too familiar to strike that chord: it probably lost its ability to evoke the fear of death somewhere between being used on an advert for Nurofen and being voted the best song ever to have sex to in a poll of Australian radio listeners.
It is a work of "cataclysmic terror", in the words of horror novelist Stephen King, who declared, "I would happily testify to its redeeming social merit in any court in the country".
Fear of the language will evolve into terror of the idea that the words convey.
I've written before about his use of "terror" (his word) tactics against the local Indigenous people.
"Drug dealer" is just a couple of words that have been coded for maximum terror.
Imaginative use is made of the chorus throughout this work, even to the extent of the composer's choice of tessitura (high or low part of the voice range): when the chorus sings of the lamentations of the people over the terrors of war, the words are sung by the dark-hued combination of tenors, baritones, and basses in their middle or lower register.
His gift for portraying stark emotion was suggested in Frank Rich's review of "Glengarry" in The Times: "There's no color in the salesman's pasty, dumbstruck face — just the abject terror of a life in which all words are finally nothing because it's only money that really talks".
And, since terror is words as well as bombs or bullets, we can expect more of this crossfire of rhetoric as the global focus on South Africa intensifies.
The genius, and the terror, of "civilisation" is in the capaciousness of the word.
