Word: babel
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...bands, bands of all-stars, bands mixing two beat and four beat men are bad. You can't have a mixture of ideas about the "proper lag" and get the swing. For unity, a really good swing band must make a football team look like the Tower of Babel...
...presses each year roll some 500 books, innumerable pamphlets and magazine articles on how to bring up children. Press, pulpit and radio also have their say. Result of this ominous babel of contradictory advice is to make many a conscientious modern parent a potential nervous wreck. This week one kindly authority raised a tut-tut. "Parents," said she, "relax...
...sciences and subdivisions each need a battery of precise terms for precise communication, so that if a common language is to take the place of special technical vocabularies, it would have to be a mon ster vocabulary requiring a lifetime to master. Dr. Neurath feels that this Tower of Babel can be overstepped by developing a common grammar of science-a unified manner of scientific exposition-so that one savant can understand another if he looks up the unfamiliar words...
When Robert Clive reached Madras one nightfall in 1744 after a 15-month voyage from London, he found India a "battered caravanserai." Its warring kinglets misruled some 90 distinct peoples whose languages were Babel. Its climate was hotter than its curry. Its diseases were "consumptions, fluxes, fevers, cholera, scurvy, berbers (a kind of paralysis), smallpox, gout, the stone, prickly heat, tetters or worms...
Inside the theatre, lobby and aisles are jammed. Chinchilla arrives to snub ermine and mink. Amid the babel of voices can be heard the high British squeak, languid Southern drawl. Continental roll of rs, marcelled New Yorkese. Down in front, as she has been at nearly every Broadway first night for over 20 years, sits elderly, fragile Mrs. Rita Katzenberg...