Word: 30s
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...their late 30s, 40s, 50s. Carpenters. Plumbers. Garbage men. Cops. Most of them are exathletes of some distant, local repute who, like most adult American males, must now take their sports vicariously. They arrive at the bar early every Sunday morning. Over coffee and the morning papers, they discuss the day's odds. "Miami, 2 1/2 over Denver," says the bartender. "Who do ya like?" Opinions are given, denigrated, defended. One of the men, a former semipro baseball pitcher, says to another man who was once his teammate, "You know, I'm thinking of making a comeback next spring...
Every time someone says "Where's it at?" it is as if a counterfeit dollar enters the nation's money supply. Gradually, people lose faith in the currency until it is as worthless as the German mark in the '30s. When it takes a wheelbarrow full of bills to buy a loaf of bread, the monetary system is no longer useful as a standard for trade. When "don't" follows "he" and "doesn't" follows "I," language is no longer a useful standard for communication...
...changes will be more complex. As the MMPI has come to be seen as a beloved landmark of American psychology, it has also come under frequent attack as dated and culture bound. Since empirical work on the test was done among pre-war, white, rural Minnesotans in their mid-30s, it does not account for newer values and is often a particularly unreliable test for blacks, women and adolescents. On the masculinity-femininity scale, a woman who says "true" to "I would like to be a soldier" or "I like mechanics magazines" risks being pigeonholed as abnormally masculine. The test...
...musicians and avant-garde actors and artists, but "decent" Americans steered clear. It was Prohibition, after all, and most Americans in the years after World War I were too busy finding bootleg gin to think about more exotic intoxicants. Marijuana began arriving in large quantities in the 1920s and '30s, smoked by Mexican immigrants who came North looking for jobs. Pot, too, was regarded with horror. One 1936 propaganda film called Reefer Madness warned the nation's youth that smoking the "killer weed" was a direct road to hell, suicide or at least insanity...
...role of Bill Snibson, the Cockney peer, was originally a star turn for Lupino Lane, a comic mime of the '30s. Lindsay, seen in the U.S. as Edmund in Laurence Olivier's TV King Lear, proves an inspired successor. He has mastered the stereotypical Cockney's accusatory inflections, rough humor, feral grace and odd parlor tricks, from a no-hands bobbing of his hat on his head to incessant, playful swiping of a bystander's gold watch. He brings vitality to such shopworn comedy as passing out, being revived and protesting, "Here! I didn't faint for water...