Word: contagions
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Give pop music fans a song they can wigwag, boom or clomp to (e.g., Down by the Old Mill Stream, Deep in the Heart of Texas'), and a national contagion is started. Last week RCA Victor had a husky little new number in the boom division called The Thing. It had sold 400,000 copies in ten days, an alltime Victor high, and was spreading like German measles...
...began translating the quatrains of the forgotten Persian astronomer-poet, Omar Khayyám. In a short time, FitzGerald's translations swept into vogue, and the Rubáiyát's call to "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou" became a literary contagion...
...Moving Finger. Victorian ladies sneaked the poems upstairs and hid them under their pillows. Lovers read them aloud, and young men quoted sadly that "The Moving Finger Writes; and, having writ, Moves on . . ." Far into the 20th Century, the contagion persisted, and Journalist-Historian Mark Sullivan, in Our Times, felt himself obliged to record that Omar's bibulous philosophy had had the "effect of sapping and undermining" U.S. morals...
...John Zahorsky worked as a pharmacist, file clerk and ladies' wear salesman to pay for his way through Missouri Medical College (since absorbed by Washington University). Within ten years he had set some doctors sniffing with his idea that children's colds were more often caused by contagion than by exposure to bad weather. Soon he was protesting against taking newborn babies from their mothers and massing them in an aseptic nursery...
...result was a contagion of contradictions. Food prices were too high, yet the U.S. Government was spending or lending more than $11 million a day to keep them that way. There was more food than people would eat, yet at least 15 million Americans (plus 600 to 700 million in foreign lands) could not get enough of the right kind. One arm of the massive Department of Agriculture was feverishly shuffling schemes for limiting farm production; another arm was busily showing farmers how, to grow more, and paying some of them hundreds of dollars for doing it. Every conceivable advantage...