Word: fad
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...meteorological fad of floods began in 1936 when warm rains melted Eastern snows, flooding the Connecticut Valley and causing a second inundation of Johnstown in Pennsylvania, Heavy rainfalls always produce floods in river valleys, but Americans having a social mind no different from their political mind, are averse to avoiding trouble, whether war or flood, by doing something about it beforehand. They prefer to stick to the waiting tradition usually illustrated by young men twiddling their thumbs in the parlors of girls that will only be "a minute," and to observe that conservative custom which scorns action until there...
...subjects of whose absurdity they are unaware, or perform the unthinkingly idiotic gestures of people who think they are alone. One of Mitchell's unselfconscious heroes was Mr. Holton, self-taught authority on mass insanity, who went crazy. Mr. Holton's wife picked up every crazy fad that came along. One night she woke him up and said "Knock, knock." "I am too old for that sort of by-play," Mr. Holton complained to Mitchell. "I do not wear long pants just because they become me." But Author Mitchell hits the authentic Lardner note most strongly...
Fashionable art previews in Manhattan bring ladies and gentlemen together for cocktails. In Chicago, they bring ladies together for tea. Last week such an affair at Chicago's Quest Art Galleries stimulated socialite previewers to start a fresh artistic fad...
...Passing Fad...
Only in the sweep of a fad could such non-fiction sales records, as reported up to last week, have been made. Only reasonable was it also that such sales should arouse the envy of magazine publishers. In the past fortnight two veteran publishers from opposite poles invaded the psychoanalytical & adult education field. One was the defunct Whiz-Bang's Publisher Wilford H. ("Captain Billy") Fawcett, the other the defunct Literary Digest's Wilfred John Funk...