Periodically throughout recorded history, puzzling instances of psychiatric and neurologic symptoms have presented en mass<span>: outbursts of thrashing and screaming, or je rky spasms and abrupt vocal tics affecting a group of individuals at once and often attributed to causes like possession, witchcraft, and malingering. Such occurrences of so-called "mass hysteria" continue to confound the medical community, but growing experience has improved the understanding and approach to these seemingly contagious psychogenic events. </span>
Answer:
During sixteen long months <u>this assault</u> has blotted out the whole pattern of democratic life in an appalling number of independent nations, great and small. <u>The assailants</u> are still on the march, threatening other nations, great and small. Therefore, as your President, performing my constitutional duty to "give to the Congress information of the state of the Union," I find it, unhappily, necessary to report that <u>the future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.</u> Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four continents. If that defense fails, all the population and all the resources of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia will be dominated by the conquerors. Let us remember that the total of those populations and their resources in those four continents greatly exceeds the sum total of the population and the resources of the whole of the Western Hemisphere-many times over.
Explanation:
For a little context, FDR wanted to counter the tendency of Americans to avoid any involvement in affairs beyond their borders and their isolationist policies.
I hope this answers your question :)
Even though synonyms generally share the same meaning, they might not apply in the same context. So, if you want to use one specific word you should do that instead of trying to find a synonym that doesn't quite fit into the context you've established. An example is if you want to use the sentence "I was mad", meaning "I was angry", you could look for a synonym. One synonym is "absurd". However, this is a different type of mad, meaning crazy instead of meaning angry. "I was absurd" has an entirely different meaning than originally intended. This is why you should always double check the contextual meaning of the synonym you want to use.
