Word: joking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When Shakuntala Devi was five years old in Bangalore, India, she liked to sit at the side of her uncle, who was studying mathematics at the university. As a joke, he told the little girl about cube roots. One day, when Shakuntala wanted money to buy candy, she offered to help her uncle with a problem in cube root if he would finance the candy. When he laughed, she promptly wrote down the correct answer on a sheet of paper...
Democracy discovered in southern Italy's municipal elections last month that it had two enemies, not one. The neo-Fascist M.S.I. (Movimento Sociale Italiano), which many people treated as a stale joke, emerged as Italy's third party and another threat to Premier Alcide de Gasperi's middle-of-the-road Demo-Christians (TIME, June 9). Last week, De Gasperi used one enemy to help strike down another. He maneuvered the Communists into helping him against the Fascists...
...Stendhal fans and students of novel writing might well read over & over to find out how a novel grows. But Stendhal said of it: "The great and actual object is laughter"; and the true measure of Lamiel's incompleteness is that much of it reads like a fumbled joke...
...revue has been presented before, but as the fellow in the next seat remarked, "the material never gets stale." Lehrer has more angles than a protractor. He uses the tired Joke of the Radcliffe girl's supposed unattractiveness, but by casting the young lady as "The Thing" (Boom-boom-boom), he leaves his audience roaring...
Last week, sprawled astride the main Red invasion route on the Ninety-Nine Hills beyond Indo-China's Bacninh, the men of the Legion's 3rd Regiment-the most decorated unit in the French army -could afford to joke about death for a change, instead of courting it. There was a lull in battle. Lithuanian Sergeant Rekstis' mortar was silent. At the siege of Quong Lam a few weeks ago, Italians, Vietnamese, Portuguese and Yugoslavs had taken bets on whether a Viet Minh sniper would get Private Mommaire (Belgian, perhaps, or Swiss). Now Mommaire was idly admiring...