Word: modernly
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Modern clubs are little more than two centuries old. They really got going in Queen Anne's London, where men- usually impelled by politics-met regularly in coffeehouses and taverns. At the Whigs' Kit-Cat Club, Addison and Congreve fellowshipped with statesmen and lords; at the Tories' Scriblerus, Swift and his friends forgathered. Before the 18th Century went out, London swarmed with clubs that, like Dr. Johnson's immortal one, produced great conversation, or like White's, Boodle's and Brooks's, witnessed some of the steepest gambling in history...
...recapture in a period spoof that is just short of burlesque. He neatly touches his stock characters and classic antics with quaintness and whimsical fancy. At his best, he gives The Merchant of Yonkers the nostalgia as well as the noise of an oldfashioned German street band. Where most modern farces have a hard, alcoholic hilarity, The Merchant of Yonkers for two acts romps and lets fly with all the innocence of a pillow fight. One of the best casts of the season throws the pillows for all they are worth...
Discouraged by a steady decline in the number of U. S. students studying languages, and by the racial and religious discriminations against teachers in other lands -which they deplored*-2,500 members of the Modern Language Association met for their 55th convention last week in Manhattan. On hand to comfort them with a puckish ode to "useless knowledge" was Dr. Joseph Wood Krutch, literary critic and English professor at Columbia University...
...have at the present time," said he, "a new reason for being proud. The scholar is supposed to be a man who has renounced the world. But the world has very seldom seemed more eminently worth renouncing. . . . The Modern Language Association's only object is the accumulation of useless knowledge, and of useless knowledge at least one thing may be said -it never did anyone any harm. . . . Some day when a little child climbs upon your knee to ask: 'Grandpa, what did you do during the Great War?' you are going to be very lucky...
...gave saliva. In 1783 an Irishman named Charles O'Brien died at the age of 22. He was 8 ft. 4 in. tall. A curious physician bought his body for $2,500, dissected the head, found a pituitary gland almost as big as a hen's egg. Modern endocrinologists regard it as the "master gland" of the body...