Word: hums
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Resonance. Don't be ashamed of singing in the bathtub, advises Dr. Freeman, but "place your head directly above a wash bowl and hum loudly, starting with a low note and gradually raising the pitch [until you] find the bowl strongly reinforcing your voice tone. . . . An entire room, especially a small one, can some times be made to resonate in this way." Theory: different substances have different periods of natural vibration; when the voice finds them, they vibrate in sympathy. Men make better bathroom thrushes than women because modern plumbing is out of phase with higher-pitched voices...
...holiday crowd filled the grounds of the New York World's Fair. It was the Fourth of July. The hum of many noises was punctuated by bursts of fireworks. Josephine Chmiel, candy-counter girl at the Polish Building, curiously watched a cluster of men, some of whom were uniformed police, standing in the roadway. One of them stooped over. As he straightened up again, a stupendous sound struck Josephine like a blow. The cluster of men vanished...
...make the nation's songs, the people who hum, whistle and sing them, the musicians who play them, last week made music that swelled and surged in a crescendo of patriotic feeling. As the sounds from millions of radios, home phonographs, jukeboxes soared over the seaboards, plains, mountains of the U. S., Walt Whitman might again have said, "I hear America singing." The U. S. was singing, as it had not done in years, of pride in its past, of hope in its future...
...troops are accompanied by bands, to give them rhythm, by which the High Command sets great store. When their band is out of earshot, men are taught to hum to themselves as they fight (a form of self-hypnosis also inculcated by the Germans...
...preparatory hum spread through the U. S. last week. Army arsenals at Rock Island, 111., Augusta, Ga., Benicia, Calif., Frankford, Pa., Dover, N. J., Metuchen, N. J.; San Antonio, Tex., Springfield, Mass., Watertown, Mass., Watervliet, N. Y., Edgewood, Md., were put on a six-day week. Two shipbuilders (Bath Iron Works Corp., Federal Shipbuilding & Dry-dock Co.) bid-o build destroyers in 18 months instead A 24. The Du Fonts ar ranged to build and operate a big powder plant financed by the French and British (see p. 79). Chrysler Corp. was ready to produce bomb fuses, shell forgings...