Word: misses
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Julius Caesar, another Ides of March was ahead, though this time the main conspirator looked more like Fanny Farmer than Cassius. She is a serious Midwestern schoolmarm, with a bent for poetry, baking cakes, and puttering in a garden. But if Miss Lenore Geweke (pronounced gave-a-key) has her way-and she well might-Latin beginners all over the U.S. will no longer fight their way through Caesar's trim, tight prose...
...Miss Geweke began plotting more than ten years ago, and has already won some powerful support. With a Ph.D. in the classics, and years of Latin teaching behind her, she had seen too many schoolkids make hard going of Caesar's Gallic War. When they finished at the end of the second year of Latin, most of them usually dropped Latin forever. Miss Geweke's plan: if most schoolkids are only going to take two years of Latin, why not give them "the best Latin"? Why not give them Vergil and his Aeneid...
More Glamor. To many an old-school Latin teacher, the idea was heresy. Vergil, they said, was much too difficult, too full of poet's irregularities. Besides, boys at least, liked to read about wars. Rubbish, said Miss Geweke. There was adventure and glamor in the Aeneid ("It contains an exciting love affair"). It was a masterpiece, "the most balanced work in all Latin literature." And it was certainly no harder than Caesar, with his long, closely knit sentences, his use of subjunctives, indirect discourse and the historical present. The Classical Association of the Middle West and South...
Last week, in a book-littered room on the University of Chicago campus, Miss Geweke was buried in vocabulary and syntax. She had three scholars working with her; volunteers in schools and colleges all over the U.S. had answered her discreet little notes asking for help, placed in classical journals. A professor at Tulane University had made her a list of 8,000 Latin words which closely resemble the English. A teacher at Pennsylvania's Ursinus College had made a frequency count of Vergil's vocabulary. The chairman of the State University of Iowa's classics department...
Some studios smiled through their tears and hastily applauded the FCC proposal. NBC, which runs the big Truth or Consequences (its Miss Hush prizes amounted to more than $21,000) and nine lesser quiz-bangs, primly pointed to its own "longstanding policy of stressing the entertainment, educational and news values of its programs . . ." WOR, key station for Mutual, another leader in the giveaway field (Queen for a Day, Three for the Money), solemnly assented: "The giveaway craze and large prizes have begun to overshadow the entertainment value of programs. Such overemphasis is not healthy for radio...