Word: notion
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Good Girls Go to Paris (Columbia), before the Hays office gave it a brush-off, had a Too in its title. As it stands, Paris is just a naughty notion in the head of a waitress named Jenny Swanson (Joan Blondell), who has big gold-digging ideas but not the true killer instinct. Jenny ends up as a sort of middle-aged Shirley Temple, patching up a flock of romantic tatters, curing rich old Olaf Brand's gouty hypochondria with extra blankets and aquavit, reminding him: "Swedes need to sweat." Nearest Jenny ever gets to Paris high life...
Nature of the Egg. One of the first such controversies in which he engaged was over the widely held notion of late 19th-Century science that a fertilized egg before starting to grow by cleavage (cell division)-and even for a time afterwards -was just so much undifferentiated raw material of life-like a lump of butter, or a pile of butter balls. Indeed one biologist did compare the early cleavage cells to "balls in a pile," and pronounced the act of cleavage at this stage to be "a mere sundering of homogeneous materials capable of any fate." The start...
This heiress, Irene Dunne, is an escapist from that "small circle that lives and dies within the circle." The prize fighter, Fred MacMurray, is different from most cine-maulers. What keeps him punching is a firm notion that falling short of the championship in any endeavor is the equivalent of a complete and final washout. For ten years of marriage he is a father who comes home now & then in the infrequent intervals of his long, confident barnstorming career in pursuit of the champion. By the time his hard-boiled-ego philosophy takes the count in a riproaring, ten-round...
Last week Professor Tyler announced results of his test, found that students thought about as fuzzily as he had expected. Only 42% could make sense of the literary passages and even fewer had any notion of what Poet Stevens was driving at; 75% believed that the poem was an argument for temperance. Similarly, the students as a group scored only 47% on literary information, 42% on scientific information. They did better (57%) on a section of the test in which their memory for facts counted. Examinees were found to have many superstitions: 70% believed that daughters resemble their fathers more...
Compounded of puns, disjointed syllables, half-words, it is closest to English, but Erse, Latin, Greek, Dutch, French, Sanskrit, even Esperanto appear, usually distorted to suggest both an alien and an English notion. The ablest punster in seven languages, Joyce sometimes combines puns and snatches of songs. Example: "ginabawdy meadabawdy!" (from a passage dealing with Earwicker's dream of a night out). Using a favorite device, he suggests that Anna Livia is the River Liffey by slyly punning on the names of other rivers: "he gave her the tigris eye," "rubbing the mouldaw stains," "And the dneepers...