Word: knell
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Nine months ago bloody nationalist riots in the Congo (TIME, Jan. 19) shocked all Belgium into realizing that the death knell was tolling for Belgian colonialism, too. Last week from Brussels, Belgian Minister of the Congo Auguste de Schrijver (rhymes with driver) broadcast the most conciliatory message yet to the freedom-hungry Congolese. But the words he used, though unthinkable a year ago, already seemed to come too late...
...Alsop is not happy. He is incorrigibly gloomy, an inveterate prophet of perdition, forever firing literate messages of despair at what he deems to be a complacent multitude of 35 million readers. His columns bong with death-knell words and phrases: "hair-raising," "chaos," "crisis," "the slippery brink of disaster," "in these dark times," "the edge of the abyss." Should hope well feebly in his breast, he is inclined to stifle it: "It is still too early to say that the worst result is already inevitable...
...bring itself democratically up to date, and the outraged ranks of the old guard on the other demanding that the Queen's critics be drawn and quartered, it has long been obvious that something must give. Last week, a terse, two-sentence announcement from Buckingham Palace tolled the knell of doom for the first innocent victims of the battle-the 800-odd young maidens who each year are ritually presented to the Queen and thereby officially emerge into the best society as debutantes...
...introduction to a critique of the eighty-fifth to ninety-fifth Cantos of Ezra Pound, MacLeish deplored the tendency of modern mass communication to express only the obvious, because of the need to cater to the "mental mass." The recent gains of such mass media might indicate the death knell for the printing press, he continued, except for the growing importance of books for expression of dissent...
Artist Ben Shahn, this year's Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer, did his best to ring the death knell last night on Clive Bell's influential critical cannon that representation is unimportant in painting...