Word: buttons
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...tall (6 ft. 3 in.), husky youngster, not quite 23 years old, paced the floor of his study in the Bucharest palace. Occasionally he stopped to finger the button which led to a concealed Dictaphone. His loose tweed jacket and baggy grey flannel trousers, his light colored eyes and curly brown hair, made him seem younger than he actually was. But he had made his first -and perhaps his last-big decision as King of Rumania. Now he was about to take the big gamble...
...anxiety over the veterans themselves, Congress did not forget the veterans' kin. One bill started the ball rolling on designs for a "Gold Star Lapel Button." Parents of men killed in World War II will get them free; brothers and sisters, at cost...
...rudder through churning seas. If the watch officer chooses, a gyro pilot will relieve the helmsman entirely and keep the ship on course. No leadsman need stand in the bow to take soundings, for the navigator has an acoustic-electric fathometer to tell him, at the press of a button, how much water is beneath the hull. Radar eyes pierce night...
Throughout them Forster contrasts the simple instincts of people with the taboos and sophistries of social custom. In The Machine Stops-written as "a counterblast to one of the heavens of H. G. Wells"-he describes a world of push-button perfection in which men have lost their souls. Says one inhabitant of this Utopia under the surface of the earth: "Those funny old days, when men went for a change of air instead of changing the air in their rooms!" But when another character gets a brief look at the earth's surface, with all its imperfections...
Except for a gaunt, tormented Job, the subjects were still the same-Brazil's button-eyed peasant women and tattered children. "I paint," said Portinari, who is a Communist, "to teach my people what is wrong...