Word: modernize
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Tottering on the pinnacle of this tower of Babel stands English, the language of the modern intelligentsia, business community and bureaucracy. More than a century ago there had been a nip & tuck d'ebate among India's British masters over a practical official language for their vast colony...
...know, but he suspects that the early high civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, characterized by agriculture, pottery-making and pyramid-building, set up a cultural tremor that lapped most of the world. Traders, explorers, fugitives and raiders carried the techniques with them, just as their modern equivalents carry the catching customs of modern industrialism. Probably faint cultural ripples, relayed slowly from people to people, and from island to island for thousands of years, finally crossed the ocean...
...President Coolidge sent his regrets to the Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts: the U.S. had "nothing to contribute" in furniture design. Last week a big, glossy exhibit, "For Modern Living," was showing visitors to the Detroit Institute of Arts how the U.S. has caught up in a quarter-century...
...steel and molded plywood chairs, unornamented chests and tables no longer wore the unfamiliar, revolutionary air which had made an earlier generation snort and settle deeper into its mohair easy chairs. Sample rooms designed by Finland's Alvar Aalto and Manhattan's George Nelson proved that with modern furnishings a home could be simple and yet warm and livable...
...world like an atomic-age version of a toilet seat. Florence Knoll's immense, pancake-thin air-foam bed, perched on spindly legs, had an insubstantial look that suggested uneasy napping. And too often, for all their inexpensive materials and simplified design, even the most agreable modern furnishings were higher-priced than the overdecorated, overstuffed period pieces most Americans are used...