Word: harmless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Department. The booklet tells the tourist that everywhere he goes on the Continent he will be regarded as an emissary of this country, "an unofficial ambassador" as they say. While designed to make the tourist's stay a pleasanter one, the pamphlet tends to creat moody paranoids out of harmless school-teachers and graduates of progressive high schools. Feeling that the results of the Geneva Conference may be undone by a single misunderstanding, they tiptoe through Europe with Doom snapping at their heels...
...unimpressed. Little dramatic parables pointing to a simple moral proved more effective, but nobody can be sure of the effect of the daily lectures, e.g., Proof that Germs, Not Witchcraft, Cause Disease. One indignant listener demanded: "Why do you waste so much time preaching to our people about harmless dirt on feet, when you could be broadcasting us how to make money and other usefuls?" One African announcer refused to read a lecture on female hygiene. "You may think this does good, bwana," he told the white station director, "but we do not speak of these things in our society...
...stay with them for a free holiday. Thus the boys come to sense the fear that lies under Fletcher's racial brag. The house is subtly menaced by a big old illiterate Kaffir, Joseph, who just hangs about. Man and wife are desperately afraid of this good and harmless man. It is all a boring mystery to the two boys until the wife's brother arrives, and in a night of violence, in which the prodigal wrecks all the furniture in the house, they piece together the elements of a painful melodrama...
...National Tuberculosis Association's annual convention, it turned out that one of their newest worries is a disease that looks and acts like tuberculosis, but is something else. More disturbing still is the fact that the germ responsible for at least one type of the illness, formerly believed harmless, is now shown to be immune to at least two of the drugs most widely used to combat...
...chair over his head. While the salesman, cowering over his vacuum-cleaner attachments, quavers: "You shouldn't do that!" husband and wife batter each other around the room. Jovial M.C. Jack Bailey explains the hoax: the husband and wife are Hollywood stunt players; the smashed furniture consists of harmless "break away" props-and, while the audience howls, the vacuum salesman is congratulated on being a good sport...