Word: familiarity
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...dispirited were they that when another motor drew up alongside, neither pedagogue noted anything familiar or remarkable in .the appearance of the driver, a slim young man with an ineffectual black mustache which inspired no confidence...
...Senator was almost instantly his old collected self, and shouted in familiar tremorless way: "We used to have green colors hung in the President's room, but some smooth-fingered fellow near Alfred thought he would hang the room in red, the cardinals colors, so as to be ready for Al." The fact is that green to red is the signal from stop to go, and shows nothing more dangerous than the immutable Coolidge cast of mind, relieved by a certain love of symbolism in surroundings...
...outside activity, athletics included, will so surely build a good citizen as conscientious application to college study. In the days when this idea bore the brand of propaganda it was quite properly abhorred, but recently it has achieved a renascence that seems unthreatened by even the ignorance of the familiar playboy. Mr. Slocum is carried on the wings of Pegasus not merely straight into the face of fortune, but also into that of undergraduate conviction...
...lines in the spectra of far off nebulae have long been thought by astronomers to be made by a mysterious element which they called nebulium. This idea was exploded by Professor Ira Sprague Bowen, famed physicist colleague of Dr. Millikan. He found the lines are caused by the very familiar elements oxygen and nitrogen. They seemed unfamiliar because, in the rare atmosphere around the stars these elements have room to cut complicated capers, storing up energy for some time, then jumping actively and shooting off rays. In the dense atmosphere of the earth they are always being bumped...
...practice of cuffing children has given way to almost complete indifference. Parents who can afford a nursemaid seldom see their small children more than once or twice a day. Then, when a child gets older he is sent away to school. He returns and finds his parents vaguely familiar, like the clock on the mantelpiece, and about as interesting as the 1913 volumes of the Atlantic Monthly on the bottom shelf of the bookcase...