All 6 Uses of
hysteria
in
The Magic Mountain
- And each time rascal luck tickled their nerves, there would be a moment of exaltation or despair, an eruption of anger or a hysterical fit of laughter, and all their outbursts were in genuine earnest and would have sounded no different had these been the ups and downs in life's fortunes.†
Chpt 7.3hysterical = exceedingly funny (resulting in uncontrollable laughter); or exhibiting excessive, uncontrollable emotion
- They would have ruined the records by playing them with used needles and leaving them lying around just anywhere on chairs, would have used the apparatus for stupid jokes like playing some sublime piece with the dial set at a speed of 110 or 0, yielding hysteric tweets or intermittent groans.†
Chpt 7.7
- and his fortnightly lectures in the dining hall—the sanatorium's main attraction, the pride of its brochure—which were always delivered from behind a cloth-covered table in an exotic, drawling accent, to an immobile audience of Berghof residents and for which he always wore a frock coat and sandals, no longer dealt with masked forms of love in action or the transformation of illness back into conscious emotion, but with the abstruse oddities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of telepathy, prophetic dreams, and second sight, the wonders of hysteria;†
Chpt 7.8
- Any man who recognizes an organic symptom of illness to be the product of forbidden emotions that assume hysterical form in conscious psychic life also recognizes the creative power of the psyche in the material world—a power he is then forced to declare to be the second source of magical phenomena.†
Chpt 7.8hysterical = exceedingly funny (resulting in uncontrollable laughter); or exhibiting excessive, uncontrollable emotion
- The materialist, as the son of a philosophy of pure robust health, can never be argued out of his belief that the mind is a phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, who proceeds from the principle of creative hysteria, will tend to answer, indeed will very soon definitively answer the question of primacy in exactly opposite terms.†
Chpt 7.8 *
- Frau Stohr was overcome with hysterical laughter, which did not stop the glass in its labors, however, and it hobbled, rattled, and slid its way to the T, but then—surely it must have left out something—it returned to the middle.†
Chpt 7.8hysterical = exceedingly funny (resulting in uncontrollable laughter); or exhibiting excessive, uncontrollable emotion
Definition:
a state of excessive, uncontrollable emotion
In addition to being the adjective form of hysteria, the form hysterical can also indicate that something is exceedingly funny (leading to uncontrollable laughter)