And when it is removed, family members will be free to ask a question that might once have reflected a certain benightedness: "Hey!"

At its uneven best, this film even succeeds in raising benightedness to an art form.

He does not speak, leaving the woman to finish this Grand Guignol puppet show in a state of benightedness.

"It is not war cries of ignorance and benightedness, nor even less, threats of bloodshed against freedom," he replied.

"Devils, save me from this benightedness!"

And in his roundabout way, Mr. Koontz means to offer insight into the benightedness of terrorism.

This was no accidental condition, following wholly from some alleged natural benightedness of the backdunes, but one which required constant vigilance and determination.

One might argue that he was forced into hypocrisy by prevailing prejudices, that he was subject to blackmail only because of society's benightedness.

But for all their benightedness, scientists are beginning to piece together a portrait of what constitutes biological diversity and how to think about keeping it around for posterity.

For one thing, he has some serious issues to be ironic about - the inefficiency of the enlightened English university system compared with the moral benightedness of supposedly rational industry.

Some may consider that program an example of liberal soft-mindedness, but then some may consider Sunday's treatment of the United Nations an example of conservative benightedness.

The prime symbol of Indian benightedness was the fakir, whose childish tricks - as the British imagined - frightened his ignorant countrymen but could never fool a Westerner.

Once again tonight, the battle between benightedness and enlightenment offers viewers of a liberal persuasion the satisfaction of sharing in the play's assumptions and having their own advanced opinions confirmed.

It is hard to say how much of this image of redneck benightedness is earned and how much is the result of a national need to poke fun at someone.

In this world, a passion for order, duty and rationality, for responsibility and common sense, is a sign both of benightedness and of a powerful nostalgia for a time of innocence that can never return.

Police insensitivity to rape victims has not gone unnoted by television, but as Maria Shriver, reporting, takes care to point out, the Santa Monica Police Department does not have a reputation for benightedness.

Ms. McTeer's Nora, confronting her husband, Torvald (the masterly Owen Teale), with the failure of their marriage, is no coolly articulate visionary, for whom a light has suddenly been turned on after a lifetime of benightedness.

Fully aware of the line of people behind you waiting to get into the booth, you do what any self-respecting American would do in this moment of benightedness: "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe," you begin saying to yourself as you vote.

Born Pearl Sydenstricker in 1892, the future Pearl Buck was a child of the American-missionary urge, so powerful in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to rescue the hundreds of millions of Chinese from their putative spiritual benightedness.

The ritual-murder accusation was an age-old European standby in which the Jews were held to murder Christian youths in an avid search for blood to be baked with the Passover matzo; dating back to the 13th century it has the stink of medieval benightedness to it.

Past anthropologists were highly impressed with the beauty and profusion of the cave drawings that first appear with the arrival of Cro-Magnon man; as much as any skeletal evidence, these drawings tended to reinforce the notion of a wonderful new sensibility replacing the quintessence of "brute benightedness."

The characters are all quick with human qualities, poignant in their benightedness: moody adolescents, truculent young farmers, grotesque old women dreaming the past aloud, Hattingh's elusive daughter, wives living in chronic terror, an aspiring schoolteacher poet, a provocative aunt whose sexual exploits among the band of white survivors connect them up in an almost incestuous way.