Word: fad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...part of Britain's latest fad, the successor to Gamesmanship and the U and non-U cult. Its name: Eleven-plussery...
...fad 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...
...fad spread, some Britons devised their own ways for dealing with questions ("Oh, they can be solved," said
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...
SNAKE DOING IN THE STARLET'S BED?) to slick women's magazines such as Ladies' Home Journal, which inquired recently: ARE WE COMMERCIALIZING SEX? (Conclusion: "Maybe.") Many other mass-circulation magazines have joined the fad for question mark journalism, and in recent months have popped brain-rattling questions ranging from WAR GETTING CLOSER? (Answer: Few governments "now rule it out") to HOW WILL THE BIRD FLY?, a report on the stock market that concluded sagely: "There was solid ground for fogbound uncertainty." In McGraw-Hill's Business Week, an inquiring headline writer last week achieved...