Word: leaven
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Yeast. The year was full of yeasty ferment; it bubbled up with new industries, gave new leaven to old ones. The television industry, which had optimistically hoped to make 600,000 sets, proved a bad guesser; it turned out 800,000, by year's end it was working at a 2,000,000-a-year clip. In its revolutionary sweep, television scared the wits out of radio (radio set production dropped 24% under 1947) and Hollywood (which hastily decided to join rather than try to beat the enemy). It promised industry an entirely new technique in remote control...
...bridges of understanding'! The Iron Curtain cuts off Russia and central Europe, but it has not yet been demonstrated that there is an Oriental Iron Curtain. Perhaps China is the one place on the globe where an imaginative church, with great experience of the land, could be a leaven able to penetrate the brittle hardtack of Communism...
...leaven its solid fare of political and artistic comment, London's socialist New Statesman and Nation conducts weekly "competitions" in epigrams, limericks, etc. Recently readers were asked to play a game originated by Philosopher Bertrand Russell. On BBC's Brains Trust program (Britain's sprightly Town Meeting of the Air), he had humorously conjugated an "irregular verb" as "I am firm; you are obstinate; he is a pig-headed fool...
...laughter, the laughter of yokels at old jokes, a mirthless and primitive sound like the cries of beasts on a farm." We Called It Culture recalls how cheap and tedious Chautauqua could be at its worst. It also insists that at its best it brought to provincial society a leaven of excitement, entertainment and intellectual stimulus...
...Baptists (they insist on adult baptism only), 200,000 Lutherans (they demand acceptance of the Augsburg Confession), a small number of U.S. Methodists, and 200,000 members of the Mar Thoma Syrian Church. But the 1,000,000-odd members of the South India Church are a leaven of unity that is already causing ecumenical stirrings in North India, and beyond. Many clergymen hopefully expect that it will eventually spread to England, Europe...