Word: digits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Millions of soldiers have been ordered to remember their serial designation since 1918. The first officer to get one, General John J. Pershing, had no trouble with his; it was 01. The drab, nine-digit Social Security number will lack the flavor of the Army serial number with its prefixes of US denoting draftee, RA for volunteer and O for officer. By 1972, the Air Force, Navy and Marines will have switched over, too. Efficiency must be served; but it just won't be the same in the war movies when John Wayne refuses to give the enemy...
Wherever feasible, he would abolish the trigger pull on tools ("The index finger tires easily, and is not well suited for pulling a trigger all day") to give more work to the thumb, the most powerful digit...
...acid. Two weeks ago on radio, he devised a game called Homeowner, in which "one person, designated the homeowner, immediately would be declared the loser, and the rest of the game would be spent determining how much he would lose." When Reasoner called the phone company to complain about digit dialing, the response made him fume: "They've got that defense in depth, whereby the first three people you talk to know only one phrase each, like a chimp trained to press a lever for a banana-flavored pellet...
...Chicago's Negro newspaper, Defender, served as director of the Institute of Jazz Studies in New York, and taught English at the University of Chicago before he joined S.F. State's English department in 1955. He has taken outspoken stands on such diverse issues as all-digit telephone dialing (against), advertising ("venal poetry") and the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley (against). In a comment that clearly foretold his attitude toward dissenters at S.F. State, Hayakawa castigated Berkeley's promoters of Free Speech. They defy authority, he complained, "yet when punitive action is threatened they holler...
...represented with total accuracy as a sequence of numbers. And since computers can do anything with numbers, they can in principle duplicate not just any sound that the human ear can hear but any sound that can be created. They do it by emitting 20,000 three-digit numbers a second--something no human could ever do--and turning them into an electric wave that can activate a loud-speaker. The computer is a universal instrument limited at present only by humans' knowledge of what numbers will recreate a given sound. As yet the richness of conventional music escapes...