Word: backgrounding
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Battle concentrated his fire on the man who was the greatest threat to Harry Byrd's political future-bald, ruddy Francis Pickens Miller, 54, onetime Rhodes scholar, veteran of both World Wars, longtime New Dealer. Miller had the social background to appeal to many Byrd-backing Virginians (as a child, his mother had been taken for rides on General Robert E. Lee's horse, Traveller) and he had the support of Virginia's growing labor movement plus a large share of the Negroes, now voting in increasing numbers...
...contains no dreadful secrets. Its symbolism is commonplace (e.g., the trowel cements men in brotherly love; the white lambskin apron is for innocence). Its ceremonies are based on biblical stories. The legend of the slaying of Hiram Abif, one of the builders of Solomon's Temple, is the background of much of the ritual. The world of Hiram Abif-in which hardware dealers, druggists, lawyers like to make-believe in off-hours-is a world of pious vows and moral refreshment...
Dulles, vacationing on Main Duck Island in Ontario, flew to New York to talk things over with the governor, then continued on to Washington to take his Senate seat. For a freshman Senator, the new arrival had an impressive background. As a top-flight international lawyer, official Republican Party foreign-policy adviser and member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, junior Senator Dulles already had a reputation that many a senior Senator would never attain. In his first senatorial statement, Dulles announced his support of the Atlantic pact and an arms program to back it up, but reserved...
...Trunk. Bald, tubby Abe Burrows, 38, says worriedly, "I don't have the right background for show business-I wasn't born in a trunk." Brooklyn-raised, Burrows majored in Latin and accounting, got his first job in Wall Street ("I went right up the ladder: runner, board boy, bond salesman-and then I was fired"). A script he wrote for Mimic Eddie Garr gave him a start in radio. Then he began satirizing Tin Pan Alley songs at private parties and convulsed Connoisseurs Groucho Marx and Danny Kaye with such numbers as The Girl With the Three...
...best way to look for uranium, says the booklet, is with a Geiger counter, now manufactured by dozens of companies and retailing for as little as $54.50. Geiger counters click all the time because of "background radioactivity" caused by cosmic rays and the tiny amounts of radioactive materials present in most rocks. The prospector should first record the "background count"; any increase is interesting. "If the radioactivity of any particular rock is four times the background count," says the handbook, "a sample should be taken...