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
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...
Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...