Word: germans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seat of McLean County. If you are talking corn and soybeans, McLean County is the capital of the world. If you are talking heartland, you are standing on it: topsoil two, three, five feet deep, divided on the plot map into square-mile sections still owned by descendants of German and Scotch-Irish immigrants who cleared and settled their way across Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Indiana, out onto the prairie. If you are talking history in McLean County, you are talking about a place that has achieved its destiny, and now has time for a backward look. The traveler discovers...
...Little, Brown; 184 pages; $17.50), Richard Humble, an English military historian, goes further than most of his fraternity to get it all in. Some of his vignettes of battle scenes-half-crazed English soldiers fighting naked at Agincourt, defeated German troops stumbling drunkenly from the First Marne-are as telling as his descriptions of the pettifoggery, vanity and incompetence of commanders and politicians. Together with an introductory section recapitulating ancient wars and a final chapter previewing the next (and last), Humble incisively analyzes 18 great victories from the day of the longbow to the era of the missile. The book...
...playful or both. Twins usually give it up at age three. But Gracie and Ginny were discovered at six, still unable to speak English. They had an apparent vocabulary of hundreds of exotic words stuck together in Rube Goldberg sentence structures and salted with strange half-English and half-German phrases. The preposition out became an active verb: "I out the pudatoo-ta" (I throw out the potato salad). Potato could be said in 30 different ways. Linguists, speech pathologists and educators hoped the twins' private communication would offer a rare window into the mysteries of developing language...
Perhaps the girls have need to keep their secret world. Born in 1970 in Columbus, Ga., to Accountant Tom Kennedy, now 47, and Christine Kennedy, now 37, a German-born bookkeeper he met in a Munich dance hall during the Fasching festival, Gracie and Ginny suffered violent convulsions days after birth. Tests showed no brain damage, but the Kennedys claim that a Georgia neurosurgeon said it would be five years before the girls could be judged normal or retarded. Kennedy, who later lost his accounting job and moved the family to San Diego in hopes of selling real estate...
...said at high speed. There was also "substantial variation" every time the twins talked. Phonetic transcripts initially brought run-together phrases like "pink-telephone" and "let's-go-marketing" to the surface, and they finally traced most of Ginny and Gracie's speech to English and minor German influences. One initial mystery, "toolaymeia" (for spaghetti), turned out to be a corruption of o sole mio, the family way of referring to Italian pasta. A scattering of words like "nunukid," "pulana" and "padeng" (possibly pudding) still remain perplexing...