Word: modernizing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When white-haired, British-born Frederick Delius died in 1934 after twelve years of paralysis and nine of total blindness, he was still one of the least appreciated of eminent modern composers. Though his works had been performed off & on in Germany, the French, among whom he spent his most productive years, had ignored him. In 1899 Delius himself arranged a concert in London; in 1929 Sir Thomas Beecham had organized a six-day Delius Festival, which the composer attended in a wheel chair. But his opera, Koanga, had waited more than 35 years for its British premiere. His masterpieces...
...brief grounding in semantics is a life work in itself. Modern semantics dates from 1923, when two English professors. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, wrote a book called The Meaning QJ Meaning, followed by Ogden's invention of an 850-word vocabulary called Basic English. Indicative of the complexity of semantics is the fact that while Ogden is an orthologist and psychologist and Richards is an esthetician, important contributions have been made by a Polish mathematician, Count Alfred Korzybski, and a Harvard physicist, Percy Williams Bridgman. Semantics ranges from the equator of Basic English through the lush...
...same category as the "souls" which savages give to trees, rivers and the like. And since language is the main instrument in regulating social relationships, the result of this word-witchery is to make men's actions also meaningless. Instead of giving souls to trees, modern man, avers Chase, personifies "national honor," "neutrality," "capital," "labor," "corporations." "It would surely be a rollicking sight," he hoots, "to see the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey in pursuit of happiness at a dance hall...
...Modern U. S. social workers play up environment, play down inheritance. But they still believe as strongly as Victorians in the therapeutic value of good reading. Last week New York's Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia issued an annotated list-of 277 books, grouped according to school grades, to be read in future by children whose misdeeds land them in the New York City Children's Court. Costing about $390, the full library contains 19 fairy stories, 81 adventure tales, 85 biographies of human and animal heroes, miscellaneous books on civics, history, hobbies, religion, etiquette. The list contains such...
Declaring that the primarily function of teeth is the preparation of food for digestion, Faul E. Boyle, instructor in operative Denistry, said that modern diet had made the teeth less necessary than in prehistoric times when man gnawed the meat from bones and chewed roots and herbs...