Word: funk
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Forty-eight years ago March 1, Isaac Kauffman Funk and Adam Willis Wagnalls, both Lutheran pastors, brought out the Literary Digest, "a repository of contemporaneous thought and research as presented in the periodical literature of the world." Such a review, thought Partners Funk & Wagnalls, would be especially handy for theologians and educators. The Literary Digest amended its formula in 1905 to include newspaper comment on news more mundane than "thought and research." In ten years its circulation stepped...
...early 20s the Literary Digest had become one of the greatest publishing successes in history. Its weekly juxtaposition of contrary newspaper opinion and cartoons had won it 1,400,000 readers, made it a national institution, a schoolroom textbook, a gold mine for its publishers, Funk & Wagnalls Co. No small part of its prestige came from its famed straw votes, whose ballots were accompanied by profitable subscription appeals. For the best part of a generation these polls forecast national election results with great accuracy. But gift premiums added to straw votes were not sufficient to offset growing public apathy toward...
...with circulation hovering at 600,000 Funk & Wagnalls hoped that another Presidential poll would prove a salutary shot in the arm. Instead, that poll mistakenly put Alfred M. Landon in the White House. Last June, the magazine having scraped bottom long enough, Funk & Wagnalls sold it to the Albert Shaws, father and son, for what was reported as a generous $200,000-only one percent of what the Literary Digest had been valued at in its prime. Merged with the Shaws' Review of Reviews as The Digest it did no better, was taken over four months later by Magazine...
...vocabulary at about 15,000 words. Recently, however, Northwestern University's Psychology Professor Robert Holmes Seashore* devised a scientific test to determine the total number of English words a person would recognize. It is a multiple-choice examination using sample lists of "basic" and "derived" words from Funk & Wagnails' unabridged dictionary, which lists 450,000 words in all. Dr. Seashore's test includes common words as well as puzzlers like antisialogogue (an agent preventing the flow of saliva). Last week he reported the surprising discovery that the average college student has a recognition vocabulary...
...further decree of the Fuhrer last week, No. 2 Nazi Hermann Wilhelm Goring will exercise the functions of Acting Minister of Economics until January 15. On that date Herr Walther Funk, considered a Goring henchman and today a state secretary in the Propaganda Ministry, be- comes Economics Minister...