Word: modernize
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Laboriously and learnedly, Dr. Wolff assembles his data. Quoting many languages (including several kinds of Polynesian), he describes the Easter Islanders as they appeared to early explorers. They were rather good-looking people, but by modern standards they were not nice. For one thing, they ate one another-enemies, friends, relatives "and neighbors-with gusto. Parents ate their children; children ate their fathers. They drew the line at mothers...
Littered over the island are many "cultural" objects. There are caves full of bones and weird mural paintings. There are stones carved with phallic symbols and strange pictures (men with wings and birds' feet). Neither the living natives nor modern scholars can read the tantalizing hieroglyphics that remain, but Dr. Wolff makes a desperate attempt. Some of the symbols, he thinks, had their origin in India, 11,000 miles away, more than 5,000 years...
Chromatic Wonderland. Though Schoenberg, along with his fellow Southern Californian, Igor Stravinsky, is one of the great musical innovators of modern times, few listeners are ready yet to say that they really like Schoenberg's ear-hurting music-and certainly no one is whistling any of his tunes. Forty years ago, after he had written his popular, Wagnerish Transfigured Night (which Antony Tudor used successfully for his ballet Pillar of Fire), Schoenberg had put conventional, barbershop-type harmony far behind him, and plunged into a chromatic wonderland where all twelve tones in an octave are of equal value...
...recently. From his Eton days, Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, now 60, has been noted for his witty, agile mind. The sixth child of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester (both his grandfathers were also Protestant divines), he grew up in what his autobiography calls "that form of Protestant piety which the modern world half regrets, half derides as 'old-fashioned...
...about the Bible as "literature." He paid scant attention to the rich, rhythmic prose of the King James version. He worked directly from the Latin, Hebrew and Greek texts, hoping to get the sense across and letting the poetry fall where it might. But he avoided using a specifically modern idiom because it would soon be obsolete again; his aim was to achieve a kind of timeless English...