Word: penciled
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Nearly every science nowadays, even fleshy anthropology, is bogged down in figures which mean little until digested mathematically. Sometimes this chore is simple, requiring only an adding machine, or a pencil, paper and persistence. More often, as science takes off into thinner & thinner abstractions, each calculation is a double-jointed equation. There may be thousands to solve, each a mind-racking job. Most established research centers have bales of figures lying around which no one has time or courage to analyze...
...hilarious dream fashion-show in which the sharecroppers doll up in fantastic mailorder finery. Actor Sharpe, specially imported from Eire, makes a lively Finian, and David Wayne an immensely engaging leprechaun. Finian's Rainbow is not lacking in good things. What it really needed was an implacable blue pencil...
...student-produced plays at Harvard? Yes? No?" There's the whole problem. You can circle "No" and concentrate on the macaroni. If you consider yourself a wit, there's plenty of shiny white space and a number of detailed questions that can be answered hilariously with a fine-pointed pencil...
...Aiken constantly emphasizes to exuberant laymen who see in this development the end for need of human cerebration. Neither Mark I nor any of the prospective calculators will be able to accomplish problems that cannot be fully reasoned out in advance and capable of solution with homely paper and pencil. The revolution that the giant calculator has brought to mathematics is the conquest of time. Even Mark I, whose fundamental mechanisms are mechanical rotating counter wheels, can accelerate by 250 to 600 times the speed of ordinary calculation...
...other encounter, a close call, had spared Runyon's life but struck him dumb. His larynx had been removed, to check a throat cancer. Since then, his gold pencil, by swift jottings in a loose-leaf notebook, had done all his talking for him. ("When he was mad," said a pal, "he'd just write in big, bold letters.") In "Mindy's," at Table 50 in the Cub Room of the Stork Club, and all along Broadway, the hard, bright, tawdry street that was his beat, the guys and dolls had known he was on borrowed time...