Word: alphabets
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Spot v. Tolstoy. The key, says Trace. is early introduction to the joys of good reading. Russian youngsters enter first grade at seven, a year later than U.S. children. But in a few weeks, using a phonics system, they can handle all sounds of their Cyrillic alphabet (Russian is more precisely phonetic than English). Bright or slow, all children then take up a standard first-grade reader with a vocabulary of 2,000 words. By comparison, one commonly used U.S. first reader. Fun with Dick and Jane* is limited to a 158-word vocabulary. Sample: "See me run," said Sally...
...excellent though temporary pacifier: the Alphabet Game. One team watches the advertising signs on the right side of the road, the other takes the left. The winner is the one who first finds all 26 letters in alphabetical order. After p, the big thrill comes with the discovery of a QUakeR STate Oil sign...
Mimi, effectively played by the star Elaine Stritch, is surrounded by a bevy of brats. She's the social director, also in charge of civilizing the passenger's children. One delightful incorrigible, Alvin Lush, will not succumb. As they play and sing through an alphabet song, little Alvin changes the "s" in shore to "w," and, when the children form Mimi's name, old Alvin comes along and turns the "w's" upside down. A hot sketch that Alvin...
...news from Paris last week, as French high-fashion designers called the coming season's styles, was shape. Last winter's flapper rage, the short, unfitted boop-a-doop look, had been inaugurated by Dior's A-shape; this year the alphabet has yielded a softer, swirlier letter as a theme-S. At the end of a week studded with the usual fashion-show crises (Red Cross ambulances stood by for crush victims, models fainted as Zippers caught, Designer Michel Goma was rushed to the hospital with appendicitis), the trend was clear: this year's styles...
While two fashion greats, Balenciaga and Givenchy, are still to be heard from, there is little even they can do to temper the new S-shape. But when the conventional alphabet is exhausted, tomorrow's woman may very well look like a la mode...