Word: acumen
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...world's eighth largest population, the twelfth largest gross national product, and it takes up nearly half of South America; yet Americans as a whole know little of this huge nation's origins and history, its culture and personality. Out of admiration as much as acumen, Publisher Alfred A. Knopf has filled the gap by publishing two volumes of the classic social history of Brazil written by Gilberto Freyre, 63, Brazil's great scholar...
...subject of the thousand-year-old bath water leads us finally to the social aspects of Oxford. Our Princeton writer had to admit sadly, that (whatever he might say) "Americans will continue to attend Oxford." Why? "To live and travel in Europe, to acquire prestige and social acumen, to work in a leisurely atmosphere." This position may be called the "Best Thing about England is Paris" view...
...Acumen in the Womb...
What's the Price? "A Marwari," the Marwaris like to say, "gets business acumen in his mother's womb." Actually, the Marwaris more probably learned it by scratching for a grim living in the Marwar region, a desert area of rugged hills and parched climate that is one of India's poorest areas. To escape this fate, Marwaris began emigrating to the city three generations back, becoming small shopkeepers in Calcutta or Bombay. They work longer and harder than anyone else, lend a helping hand to each other (there are no Marwari beggars), and single-mindedly devote...
Burdick and Wheeler, like Packard, Robbins and others, are merely clever peddlers of cheap, sensational trash seen at a lower intellectual level in the glossy pulps, and they estimate their market with similar acumen...