Word: malthus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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After more than a century of intermittent haunting, the ghost of a gloomy British clergyman, Thomas Robert Malthus, was on the rampage last week. Cresting a wave of postwar pessimism, it flashed through the air on the radio, rode through the mails in magazines. Publishers opened their arms and presses to "Neo-Malthusian" manuscripts prophesying worldwide overpopulation and hunger. Two "scarce books"-Our Plundered Planet, by Fairfield Osborn, and Road to Survival (a Book-of-the-Month selection), by William Vogt-were glowingly reviewed and selling like hot cakes. Their influence has already reached around the world...
...Malthus' "Essay on Population" will be the basic text for the discussion...
...difficulties in conversation will strike a responsive chord in the cochlea of every hard-of-hearing person. She admired Malthus but could not understand him; he had a harelip and a cleft palate. Wordsworth took his teeth out after dinner, which made his most inspired words unintelligible to poor Harriet...
...neglected Ec. text caught his eye, (Ec. 51a, 1hf, Tues., Thurs., Sat., at 10.) O well, no understanding professor would expect a red-blooded Vag to respond to the charms of Malthus on a big day like this. Besides, he probably wasn't missed. He was sure he would have added nothing to Malthus's wisdom; not quite so sure his prof. was "understanding." Enough of that, this waiting was giving him the jitters...