Word: archaicism
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...throwback to the old-fashioned football college comedy where education consists of numskull sessions and coeducation of necking sessions. The second (and last) act plunks a few blank cartridges into Madison Avenue, the most oversimplified U.S. symbol of evil since George F. Babbitt. To compound the sense of the archaic, the hero tumbles onstage with a planeload of European fellow immigrants to raise an Ellis-Islandish plea of ''melt us" before audiences that would rather be caught naked than stewing in the common pot of conformism...
Most of the drama's humor is of a puckish sort; it involves the archaic formalism of the Masters, or the shrewishness of Eva's nurse Magdelene. Eunice Alberts sang a delightfully sprightly nurse, but Thomas Hayward (her fumbling lover David) did not give his movements and voice color and conciseness and consistency necessary to a humor ostensibly quaint. So also James Billings as Beckmesser, Walther's rival for Eva, effectively deadened Wagner's critique of professional narrow-mindedness with his ill-controlled buffoonery...
...decade, U.S. railroads and their unions have been at loggerheads over work rules. The unions, uneasily watching railroad employment dwindle from 2,000,000 in 1920 to 780,000 in 1960, have fought to preserve their hold by negotiating archaic, make-work labor contracts. The railroads, battered by competition from trucks, buses and planes, have fought to cut jobs still more and in 1959 launched an all-out publicity attack on the "featherbedding," which they claimed cost them $500 million a year. Last week, after more than a year of study, a 15-man Presidential Railroad Commission came up with...
...start of the show, Jules Feiffer stepped onto the stage of Sanders Theatre, commented briefly on that archaic, dark monstrosity, and then described his interest in the revue about to unfold. "People used to tell me that I had a good ear for dialogue and that my strips would go well on the stage. I'm here this afternoon to nail that lie." He didn't quite succeed...
Died. Dr. Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, 90, genial, imaginative Biblical scholar who in 1923 produced one of the first translations of the New Testament in modern English (The New Testament: An American Translation), continued his lifelong crusade to distill clear 20th century meaning from archaic Biblical language with a steady flow of books and essays (How to Read the Bible, A Life of Jesus); of a stroke; in Los Angeles...