Word: barrenly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...barren room in Paris' venerable Sorbonne, a dimpled blonde teen-ager stood quaking before five quizzical professors. With quavering chalk she diagramed on a blackboard the working of a steam engine. Then, taking up other items of her examination, she stumbled through an account of the history of Japan from 1875 to 1905, explained the functioning of an eardrum and expounded her ideas on the philosophical principles of mathematics. When it was over she tremblingly left the room and, whispering "My stomach aches," took her place with other waiting youngsters...
About the time of Christ, he died in a valley near Pisco,* on the coast of southern Peru. He was probably a high priest or a chieftain because his honored body had been carefully wrapped in layers & layers of cloth and buried far out on a barren desert. As the centuries passed, his people were killed or dispersed and all memory of them vanished. Last week his mummy, unwrapped with loving care at New York's American Museum of Natural History, showed what an odd and gorgeous culture had flowered in a desert-ringed Peruvian valley 20 centuries...
Only one of the composers who replied thought the traditional scale was all washed up. Wrote 79-year-old but still rebellious Florent Schmitt: "The end of our twelve-tone system is inevitable . . . It has been tortured to the point where it is now as barren as an old skeleton . . . We have to venture into new fields." His solution: an 18-tone scale, made of third-tone intervals instead of the usual half tones...
...Send the Man Away." At first, his institute was only a single bungalow. "Our front verandah served as classroom and laboratory, our back verandah as dining room and dairy." But the news of what was done there soon began to spread. The big, smiling "Padre Sahib" had turned barren and eroded acres into rich meadows of wheat. He taught the villagers how to plow and irrigate their crops. He set up a department of agricultural chemistry, and a home economics course for women...
...Marcos wasn't much of a capital city, and the country itself was immemorially backward, wretchedly poor. Two percent of its people owned 80% of the land; tenant farmers got 2? a day, skilled workers 7? an hour. On the highlands, hungry Indians scratched the barren slopes for corn, still trying to live by what they remembered of the dignified old tribal customs. And ruling the country was Dictator Ronca, a strutting, streamlined Latin American demagogue who had won the peasants' support by promising them land, only to suppress them as soon as he got to power...