Word: nugget
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Above and behind the mouth cavity, tucked into a cradle of bone at the base of the human brain, lies a reddish nugget of tissue, no bigger than a big pea in normal adults-the pituitary gland. Galen, the famed physician of antiquity, and Vesalius, the great anatomist of the Renaissance, knew it. They thought it 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...
...biographies and works of history published each year in the U. S. reach big audiences. But most of them contribute at least one nugget of enlightenment with which a discriminating reader can enrich his knowledge of the past. Last month three new works, too specialized to be very popular, made absorbing reading for amateur historians...
...Fraser (Bobbs-Merrill, $3.50), is history written with journalistic liveliness. It pictures in swift chapters the fight of Jackson and Tyler against the United States Bank. Packed with savory local color, Democracy in the Making makes the Jackson-Tyler era seem closer at hand than the Harding administration. Typical nugget of unfamiliar information: In 1837, during the Canadian rebellion. Englishmen seized the U. S.-owned Caroline on Lake Erie, killed the crew, sent the ship over Niagara Falls...
...century and more ago when census takers began to go through the ghettos of German cities, Jews were obliged for the first time to adopt surnames. Sometimes allowed to pick, they chose names of the prettiest things that they could think of-Goldstein (nugget of gold), Rosenblum (blossom of the rose), etc. Last week the German Government again decreed that Jews would have to take names, not cognomens but praenomina, and told them what names to take. The decree ordered that any German Jew who has not an Old Testament given name which identifies his race must before next January...
Many a foreign news dispatch to the U. S. is about one-tenth fact and nine-tenths rumor and conjecture. Working in a murky subterranean world of censorship, rumor-mongering and diplomatic duplicity, an honest reporter must search every shovelful of rumor for the nugget of fact, assay each fact for the elusive motive that gives it value. On the basis of a single such fact, not necessarily important in itself, an impressive and vaguely portentous flow of dispatches can be written from the capitals of Europe, recounting rumored reactions and reactions to reactions...