Word: mumming
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...mum audience of Oxford undergraduates, in a dim lecture hall which, not long before, had resounded with pacifist slogans, Britain's Foreign Secretary expounded last week the novel doctrine that this war is one "between youth and youth." Assuming the role of Pontius Pilate for his generation, Lord Halifax squarely lays the responsibility for the Second World War at the door of German youth, whom he condemns in one and the same breath as "materialistic" and "prepared to sacrifice their lives without a moment's hesitation." A jumble of mysticisms and paradoxes, His Lordship's speech is termed...
...picked troops to Canada, got its Navy ready. England raged and ranted about dismembering the upstart Republic. New York City feted Captain Wilkes and Northern hotheads boasted that the Union would give Britain some of the medicine it was about to give the South. Abraham Lincoln kept mum, for weeks. Eventually he had Secretary of State Seward discover that, while Captain Wilkes was within international law in arresting the Trent, he went beyond it in removing its passengers without taking the ship and them before a prize court. Messrs. Mason & Slidell were released from jail in Boston, placed...
...beginning of World War II. the U. S. Weather Bureau's forecasts have been seriously handicapped. In prewar days, the Bureau received constant reports from foreign merchant ships fanned out along the Atlantic lanes. Now, fearful of divulging their positions to enemy raiders, ships move secretly, radios mum. Stations in England, not anxious to give weather tips to Nazi bombers, keep their reports dark. Even Canadian weather reports have stopped...
...they had been, reserved the freedom to put on the clamps should Tokyo further injure U. S. sensibilities or rights in China. On the day when the trade treaty lapsed and this Damoclean policy went into effect, Secretary of State Hull was bedded with the sniffles. President Roosevelt was mum. U. S. scrap iron, oil, many another export essential to Nippon's Armies continued to move across the Pacific. Embargo-minded Senators were given to understand that it would be a good idea to hold off on bills curbing trade with Japan, let Ambassador Horinouchi and his superiors...
...this indoor sport continued. His Majesty's puzzled Poet Laureate, famed John Masefield, whose yearly stipend is ?127 ($508), kept mum as a Cornish oyster, but Mrs. Masefield admitted: "My husband has been approached on the subject, and the quotation in his opinion is the work of a modern poet writing in Biblical style. From the style he thought it might possibly be written by G. K. Chesterton. He went to considerable trouble to try to trace the words, but without success." Sir Edward Denison Ross, the eminent British expert on Oriental literature, guessed that the words must come...