futility music
n.— «“These people haven’t heard heavy metal. They can’t take it,” a psy-ops sergeant told Newsweek. And in Guantánamo, they even have a name for it. The Pentagon’s Schmidt investigation identifies it as “futility music”—that is to say, screamingly loud and deliberately Western music that will, per the Army field manual, “highlight the futility of the detainee’s situation.”» —“Disco Inferno” by Moustafa Bayoumi Yahoo! News Dec. 8, 2005. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Why is it harder to talk if we don’t move our hands? Even when we’re talking on the phone we feel the need to gesture to aid communication. A new book offers a look at the relatively new field of gesture studies. And: Ever wonder why we describe the...