Word: archaicism
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...nose from boxing. A man of healthy cynicism, Forrestal sometimes says: "I doubt very seriously that I'm doing any good down here. I don't know whether businessmen should go into the government or not." But as Under Secretary of the Navy, Jim Forrestal reorganized the archaic Navy purchasing system, is now responsible for all of its huge procurement program. By making his job one of Washington's best-managed, he has earned the town's respect...
...scream from the same eagle. Opera was popular in every major city. In Philadelphia Andrew Adgate projected, in 1786, a great choral concert, with singers from every section of Philadelphia society. His grandiose plan, which fizzled, was to anneal all social disparities through the use of "solfa," the powerful archaic open scale which artisans and farmers still knew from the Middle Ages, but which the musically literate upper classes had begun to scorn. In Boston the one-eyed crippled tanner, William Billings, was even bolder. He got the cello into church, and the much more needed pitch pipe. Against...
...word gingerbread" as a synonym for superfluity is a grievous error. . . . From antiquity, gingerbread was a ceremonial food and regarded as an appropriate sacrifice to the gods. ... As such it was ... often prepared in fanciful shapes and elaborately gilded. It was from this archaic custom that the expression developed, "the gilt is off the gingerbread. . . ." But mark you, it was the gilt that was "off," the gingerbread remained...
...this whimsical tale, which marches like the King of France up to the inaudible stamp, then back again, Thompson added a fresh, unaffected, transparent score packed with singable melody. Listeners, noting the conventional harmonies, the archaic touches, the occasional flavor of Handel's music, decided that Thompson in his music, as Kipling in his story, was turning to the past...
...Forgotten Village (Kline; Mayer-Burstyn) is a documentary film of integrity and beauty, the story of the triumph of modern medicine over an archaic female herb doctor in the squalid village of Santiago, high in the mountains of Mexico's centra! plateau. Its post-production history is the triumph of reason over the paleolithic prejudice of New York State's three-man-four-woman board of movie censors, who banned the picture because it was "indecent . . . inhuman...