Word: fad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...photos than his rivals, simply by splattering ink on his negatives. He also did early composites, during a macabre era in which people liked to be photographed with shadowy pictures of their deceased spouses showing in the background. He tried to make money printing photographs on satin pillowcases (a fad of the times), went $1,500 in debt with his own studio, then joined...
...individual life and effort. But to the Christian philosopher, the gospel according to Sartre will appear hardly more than another faddist version of Materialism. And the critical mind of France seemed still to be at work in the weekly, Les Nouvelles Littéraires which castigated it as a "fad of ugliness-Sartre's books seem to be a transcription of the mental life of ignoble and tranquilly abnormal people . . . sickening mixture of philosophic pretentiousness, equivocal dreams, physiological technicalities, morbid tastes and hesitant eroticism . . . an introspective embryo that one would take distinct pleasure in crushing...
Along with the pulp books, Street & Smith built pulp magazines (Ainslee's, Top Notch, etc.), which kept going when the penny-dreadful fad passed. Some, like Western Story, still have a cozy 400,000 circulation. They have followed every change in public taste from the Western plains to the sea, to the air, to cops & robbers, and back to cowboys. At the crest, when it sold 95 million magazines and pulps a year, S. & S. had a stable of such writers as Upton Sinclair (who wrote under the name of Ensign Clark Fitch, U.S.N.), Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton...
Scientific Inhumanity. But about the worst menace to children, in Dr. Bakwin's opinion, is the fad for incarcerating them in hospitals. To begin with, he thinks that, in spite of some advantages, a hospital is a poor place for a child to be born in: 1) there is little evidence that hospital delivery has reduced maternal or infant deaths; 2) it exposes the newborn infant to hospital-prevalent diseases (notably diarrhea) and the scientific inhumanity of doctors and nurses. Separating the baby from its mother at birth, instead of allowing it to be cuddled and breastfed...
Best-sellers have sometimes ridden the crest of a fad, sometimes have been the stone that set the avalanche in motion. Linen dusters fluttered along U.S. highways in 1905, and in their back draft C.N. and A.M. Williamson, specialists in vapid romances of the open road, whose heroines invariably fell for their chauffeurs (all princes in disguise), were swept on to the best-seller list with their The Princess Passes. In 1923 a slim volume with a top-heavy title, Self-Mastery through Conscious Auto-Suggestion, had Americans everywhere murmuring, "Every day in every way, I am getting better...