Word: contagion
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...Grinned Colonel Boumedienne: "That won't make the Americans happy." Contagious Guns. While the tribesmen roasted an entire sheep on a spit for lunch, Algerian horsemen charged back and forth on the plain below, rising in their saddles to fire their flintlocks in unison at the sky. The contagion spread to the F.L.N. troops on the ridges and crests. and for 20 minutes gunshots echoed in the hills. Moslem children burst into tears and some of the guests looked nervously toward the border, fearing the French might respond by firing in earnest. But French guns remained silent...
WAIF & SAFE. H. L. Mencken called attention to the native U.S. talent for "reducing complex concepts to starkest abbreviations." From O.K. to K.O., Americans have long coined initial-born words. But what began as playful sport has turned into contagion and verbal smog (smoke and fog). Just to describe the new rash of alphabetease, linguists were forced to invent a new word: acronym (from the Greek akros for tip, onyma for name), which first appeared in dictionaries in 1947. Most insidious breeders are public relations experts, adept at spawning the punch word that sums up an organization, then...
...College Plan," this year's shrewdest innovation in independent study. After World War II, Wesleyan elected to stay small-and get better. It stiffened courses, doubled the faculty, lured lively outside lecturers. But "a kind of diminishing return" seemed apparent. Instead of "catching the intellectual contagion." says Butterfield, students merely became "more dutiful." Another problem: What moral right did Wesleyan have to turn away a growing flood of able applicants...
...Contagion. Some of the oil fever rubbed off on bureaucratic, bumbling YPF. "The Americans are teaching us many new ways," said a YPF engineer last week. "They have instilled in the whole area an attitude that work can be fun, too." Now rating top priority in Frondizi's budget, YPF will drill 4,100 wells on its own by 1965, has let contracts to Kerr-McGee, Southeastern Drilling and the Italian ENI for another...
...report to the faculty for 1930-31, Lowell had urged the establishment of "a Society of Fellows, composed of a limited number of the most brilliant young men that can be found... Such an atmosphere should carry intellectual contagion beyond anything now in this country," he said. "To be thoroughly effective the Society should be well endowed, but where conviction of value is strong and enduring, the means are sometimes forthcoming." Indeed they were, and from no one other than Lowell himself, so that in little more than a year, the first group of Junior Fellows was established in Eliot...