Word: elevens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...part of Britain's latest fad, the successor to Gamesmanship and the U and non-U cult. Its name: Eleven-plussery...
...began after this year's crop of ten-and eleven-year-olds took the controversial "eleven-plus examination" (TIME, Feb. 4, 1952) that will determine whether they will be allowed to prepare for a university at a grammar school or have to be satisfied with a commercial, technical or trade school. As the youngsters recited the questions they remembered, their parents began testing each other and their friends. Then the London Daily Mail published some of the questions as a challenge to their readers. How many adults, the paper wanted to know, could get through the ordeal their children...
...article brought a deluge of letters. Employers demanded that the Daily Mail stop publishing such questions because their employees were spending all their office time playing Eleven-plussery. An Oxford don was approached by a reporter who demanded that he answer: "A clock is twelve minutes slow but is gaining five seconds per hour. A watch is 20 minutes fast, but is losing 7½ seconds per hour. How many minutes fast will the watch be when the clock shows the right time?" A few days later, a primary schoolmaster wrote a whole article defending his incorrect answer...
Actress Yolande Donlan. "Probably by algebra, but not by me"). But to others, the fad merely strengthened their conviction that there was something basically wrong with making children determine their whole future by the eleven-plus ordeal. "The invention of the devil!" cried the Rev. Arthur Morton, Director of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. "I say that future historians will condemn us as much for this as we rightly condemn the people who made young children work in mines...
Though President Morse was still firmly in control of the company. Silberstein confidently claimed eventual victory. He announced that an unofficial count of the ballots gave him 696,686 shares (50.77% of those outstanding), enough to seat six of his seven candidates for the eleven-man board. "There is no mystery about how we got our stock," said Silberstein. "It was for sale and we bought it. The Morses could have bought it just as we did." Countered President Morse: Silberstein's claim of control "is as phony as a $3 bill." The courts, insisted Morse, will prove...