Word: criticism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Richards, a literary critic and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, wrote the first book about modern semantics, The Meaning of Meaning, with Charles Kay Ogden, a fellow Cantabrigian...
...form, he adds, is ability to ferret out the changed meaning of old words in new settings. E.g.: The water is boiling in the kettle. The kettle is boiling. ("Kettle" changes its meaning in the second sentence.) Mr. Richards' first lesson is on rhetoric, his first example a critic's comment on a passage in Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry...
...critic objected that florid Elmer Gantry compared love to five incompatible things, that this is as absurd as comparing a motor car to a bag of potatoes. Mr. Richards believes metaphors (comparisons) are the root of thinking, and that no metaphor is absurd if there is a specific and intelligible link between the things compared. Mr. Richards recalls that a Harvard English professor once christened his ancient Ford Thaïs (after the heroine of Anatole France's story) because "she had been possessed of many." "If we can do that to a car, successfully," twinkles Mr. Richards, "what...
...When Hellzapoppin (TIME, Oct. 3) opened in Manhattan, all critics agreed that it split their eardrums, few admitted that it split their sides. One of the few was Critic Walter Winchell. Winchell razzed his fellow critics, claimed that seven out of eight had also "laughed & laughed & laughed" but were ashamed to admit it in print next day. In the uproar which followed, three-ring Critic George Jean Nathan (Esquire, Newsweek, Scribner's) backed up Winchell, called Hellzapoppin "funnier than the Pulitzer Prize"; Critic John Anderson (N. Y. Journal & American} refused to budge an inch; wisecrackers in general suggested...
...German War Minister for the years 1895-96. In Germany he himself is addressed as Baron. He knows German history and speaks the language (as well as French and Spanish) fluently. He knows news. He had 20 years' (1910-30) newspaper experience on the Brooklyn Eagle as dramatic critic, editorial writer, associate editor. He has long trained himself in extemporaneous public speech. At Harvard ('09), he won the Coolidge and Boylston prizes for debating and oratory, and for the last 16 years he has stepped to the microphone with only scribblings for script. His most exciting...