Word: odd
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...heavy to the hand-and the best ore there is. Below were huge deposits of "Canga" (54-62% iron) and soft "Itabarite" "(45-52%). After the tests, the work went ahead faster than ever. Though mechanization was by no means complete, Rio Doce was showing results. Last year, 700-odd Brazilian miners, with the help of two U.S. superintendents, dug out 177,000 metric tons of ore, sold it to Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corp. at a profit...
Most of the 1,600-odd known asteroids (small-fry planets) revolve in orderly orbits between the paths of Mars and Jupiter. But last week an asteroid was off its reservation and rapidly approaching the orbit of the earth. Astronomer C.A. Wirtanen of Lick Observatory, Calif., who spotted it, figured that it was some two miles in diameter (about the size of the Matterhorn broken off at its base) and big enough to give the earth a sizable jolt...
...only concern, he said, was that the loss of the account would jeopardize the jobs of about 200 out of 1,000-odd F. C. & B. employees (who once included rambunctious Frederic [The Hucksters'] Wakeman). After "long and prayerful wrestling" with this problem, Foote said, he decided to sacrifice himself, if necessary. Flying to Chicago for a Sunday meeting with Partners Fairfax Cone and Don Belding, he offered to resign from the firm if his associates decided to keep the account. But Cone and Belding would not hear of it, said Foote, so the account was dropped instead...
...This odd truce is upset by the parachute arrival of Adrian Bullivant, a British officer and even more of a weakling than most weak young men in modern British novels. He has come to instruct the 23rd Corps to blow up a dam in behalf of the Allied armies, but once his foggy mind grasps the impossibility of such a project he settles down to enjoy life...
...this comes off quite convincingly in Clewes's tight novel. But after having enjoyed this odd story the reader may wonder: What is the author trying to say? That Bullivant is a weakling and Slater a no-good and that weaklings and no-goods cause trouble'? Granted. But is that sufficient ground for implying, as this novel clearly does, that the partisans' original attitude was morally right, that passivity is preferable to active resistance to tyranny? The Dreader may wonder what is the decay of values, the spiritual malaise that leads so talented a writer to write...