Word: auk
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cruel sea calms and the weather mellows, the population of Lundy swells from seven to 80 or so. Then the bluebottles flock to the island by the thousands to marvel at the ice-age cabbage that now grows nowhere else, or to catch a glimpse of a puffin, an auk, a rare peregrine falcon, or any other of the 145 kinds of birds found on Lundy. But as much as anything else, the bluebottles seem to come to spend a little time-and a few puffins-in a place with no taxes, no license laws, no schools (the only child...
Wodehouse laments the fact that "the Edwardian butler . . . has joined the Great Auk, Mah Jong and the snows of yesterday in limbo." Says he: "The change in conditions in English life has made it rather difficult for my kind of writing. Comedy does so depend on prosperity." Once a professional drama critic (for Vanity Fair), in recent years he has habitually left any play after the first act, no matter how good or bad. Rather sadly he recalls that England was once full of the dotty people he wrote about. "But I suppose a couple of wars have made...
Night of the Auk (by Arch Oboler) took place on a rocket ship returning to the earth from man's first landing on the moon (time: "The day after some tomorrow"). The mood of the return voyage is far from jubilant, what with a loathed egomaniac in command, a succession of murders and suicides, the discovery that full-scale atomic war has broken out on earth, and the knowledge that the rocket ship itself is almost surely doomed. Playwright Oboler seems indeed to be prophesying that the atomic age may end up with man as extinct as the great...
Vanishing Breeds. When the first count was run on Christmas Day in 1900, birds were getting scarcer in the U.S. The great auk and Labrador duck were gone; the umbrageous flocks of passenger pigeons were reduced to a pathetic aviary remnant; the trumpeter swan seemed likely to be silenced forever. Then came bird-protection laws and treaties. Although these are still not fully enforced, nearly all the once-threatened birds have come back, some in greater numbers than ever before. Birders, as bird watchers call themselves, have multiplied with the birds. Only a handful of the watchers are professional ornithologists...
...skirts require pretty, polished shoes--and certainly no sneakers. Classrooms are in for a new era of neat loafers and slim low pumps, or the handsome British shoes and their imitations now flooding the market. Stockings are important; the woolly anklets take their place with the extinct Great Auk...