Word: epigrams
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After subjecting patient listeners to a winter-long barrage of sickly sweet patriotic songs, the radio networks have hit upon the happy idea of pressing announcers and band leaders into service, and a new silly season seems imminent. Their whimsy seems to be that a cute patriotic epigram or a snappy call to arms by your favorite band leader will jack up, sagging morale. This must prove most interesting reading when Axis propagandists describe it to the people back home...
Full of years and honors, rich in curious lore and master if lethal epigram, an archetype of the New England schoolmaster has crossed over to where the Shakespearean-Baconian controversy has long since been settled. No that it ever troubled George Lyman Kittredge, Gurney professor of English at Harvard University ("I will admit that Bacon wrote them if you will tell me who wrote Bacon"), for he had better use for his time. Jack Macy used to do an impersonation of Kittredge (in "Kitty's" presence), excoriating every known editor of Shakespeare. I have been too busy for the pawst...
...Claude got fancy notions about going to Purdue University's School of Agriculture at Lafayette, 25 miles away. He graduated in 1915, with old-fangled resolve and new-fangled ideas, went back to Section 29. He tested the soil, found it sour, made a homely epigram: "We're mining the soil-not farming it." He began experimenting. Heedless of neighbors' alarms that he would kill the soil forever, he strewed phosphorus on the fields. He did nothing but farm, talked only about farming. His horizon stretched as far as he could see from his hog pastures...
...whatever the cause, the result is big box office, and rightly so. For the period is admirably adapted to a combination of stealthy, seething intrigue and red-blooded action. Them was the days when you didn't clout a guy over the head with an epigram or plug him with a bullet; you killed him at the end of a fifteen minute sequence of dueling and overturned every table, chair, and candelabrum in the bargain...
...simple. His belief in a final Hitler defeat is no mere Little Englander's faith in muddling through. It comes from his faith that "what force alone constructs has neither permanence nor life." The concept of triumphant conquest he answers with Bacon's epigram: "Rome did not spread upon the world; the world spread upon the Romans." Says he: if the Nazis, the Fascists and the Japanese "had even a glimmering of this profound truth they might become centres of lasting world systems. But it is of their natures that they are blind to the eternal laws. They...