Word: pasts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Kind Gentleman. In the homestretch, the campaign had been spotted with Zwischenfälle (incidents). A tear-gas bomb drove Communist Max Reimann from his rostrum; bullets breezed past Socialists in the Ruhr. Some swastikas appeared, some Sieg Heils resounded...
Like Ecuador's Chief of State, many of you have taken time off during these past few hot weeks to write me about a wide variety of matters. Here are some of the things you have been concerned about...
...crowded inhabitants of big cities tried to live cannily. They avoided hot subway gratings and steaming manholes as martens avoid traps; when walking they tried to route themselves past the doors of air-conditioned movies, where they could breath in a little coolness. The touch of a barber's hot towel, or the simple process of swallowing hot coffee, was enough to make a shirt go limp or a woman's make-up shine greasily. In the packed and airless slums, tens of thousands slept on rooftops or fire escapes. The heat seemed even more pitiless out across...
Punchy Prose. Clifton (Information Please) Fadiman thought that an impressive-and depressing-fact about the past 25 years was the decline in reader "attention." Readers refused to read anything except "the shortened paragraph, the carefully measured column, the 'punchy' sentence." The whole thing had reached its climax, he thought, in the new Cowles-published Quick-"a news digest of news digests." Wrote he: "One can easily imagine a digest of Quick (Quicker) and finally one of Quicker (Quickest). From Quickest to the nonreading of the news seems a logical next step...
...forestall bad luck, or avoids walking under ladders, or refuses to light three cigarettes on a match, is not permitted, however, to grin too widely. He should read on. Some authorities hold that "touching wood" signifies touching the Holy Cross for protection; others look still further back into the past and see it as an invocation of tree spirits. A ladder leaning against a wall forms a triangle, which is inviolable for the same reason that makes "three on a match" taboo: both represent the Trinity...