Word: often
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...different systems of weights and measures. Dates and records are kept according to 30 different calendars, at least one of which, instituted more than 500 years ago with a slight miscalculation, has slipped out of phase by 23.2 days, so that Hindu dances meant for moonlit nights are often performed in total darkness. To top it all, the Indian coinage system, based on the coinage standardized by conquering British in 1835, is at least as unwieldy as that used in Britain itself...
...hilarious. The songs are chain-gang, camp-meeting U.S. imports: Wabash Cannonball, Frankie and Johnny, I Shall Not Be Moved. The musicians generally are amateurs, paid with coffee and Cokes, belting out their rockabilly on a couple of guitars, a banjo and a bass fiddle (sometimes store-bought, more often conjured out of an empty tea chest, a broomstick and a knotted string...
Coals to Newcastle. Crouching before the mike during halves of the Globetrotters' basketball ballet, Donegan crooks his right knee, pumps his foot convulsively and whangs his guitar, occasionally wrenching his pelvis Elvis-fashion. Most often he sounds like Grand Ole Opry cornball recorded at 33⅓ r.p.m. played at 78. Backing up the young (25) Glasgow-born skiffler are a second guitarist, a two-beat drummer and the best showman of the combo, a red-goateed bass plucker named Mickey Ashman, who twirls his big fiddle, tops the act by rolling on the floor with...
...oral tradition of Hebrew and Aramaic underlying the Greek of the written Gospels made it necessary to use rough and often clumsy Greek equivalents for Semitic concepts. Hence, the treasury of scroll literature is enabling scholars to achieve new insight into the meaning of many passages. For example, the question of what the angels sang in their well-known announcement of Jesus' birth has long bothered Biblical scholars. "And on earth peace, good will toward men," says the King James version, and the Catholic Douay Bible has it "peace to men of good will." Now in the scrolls...
...Today the scholars for the most part leave the search to the tribesmen, who have become highly skilled in the work. The Bedouins sift with timeless patience through four-foot layers of dust and bat dung, spoonful by spoonful, to find the tiny fragments of black and crumbly leather-often smaller than a postage stamp-that they know will make them rich. The Jordan government has given the Ta'amireh Bedouins a cave-hunting monopoly-making the Qumran area a military zone, and policing it to keep other tribes from muscling in on the scroll rush...