Word: chaff
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When it was all over, perhaps 7,000,000 people had disappeared, either into the GPU mass burial pits or into the vast slave camps of Siberia. But Stalin could rest: he had destroyed many innocent people, but with the good grain he had also burned the chaff of the old Bolshevik Party, the chief challenge to his power. He himself slept well. The new generation of party members, which he set about recruiting and educating, were functionaries, meek & mild bureaucrats, with a mortal fear in their bowels...
...finest Secretaries of State left office last week. Brilliant enough to create profound policies, efficient enough to extract the best from his department, and bold enough to trust the experience, intellect, and judgment that went into foreign affairs during his regime, Dean Acheson is now reaping the sort of chaff great statesmen usually do in insecure times. When all has blown away, we suspect that Americans will appreciate fully the services of a man so well suited...
...threshing is done by ancient methods. Oxen pull sleds, equipped with sharp flint points, around & around in the harvested wheat stocks, cutting them apart. Then the peasant and his family toss the grain into the air, allowing the wind, as it has for centuries, to separate wheat from chaff. (Sometimes there is the incongruity of a flint sled being pulled around by a bright, red, new, ECA tractor...
Despite the Iron Curtain and the familiar Soviet passion for secrecy in its affairs, a good deal of news can be gotten out of Russia. But it takes digging. That is why TIME has a "Russian Desk," whose three members spend their time winnowing facts from the Russian chaff. Last week's Background For War story in TIME on Russia's war potential was a good example of the nature of their work...
...Sample from a recent select-the-best phrase question: "In trying to renew old recollections, we cannot unfold the whole web of our existence; we must 1) winnow the wheat from the chaff, 2) pick out the single threads, 3) scrap the flotsam and jetsam, 4) isolate the relevant factors, 5) distinguish between the warp and the woof." Students who ticked off No. 2 got it right...