Word: pluralism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week the word was out that the books would have to change their tune, as the result of four years' patient work by bulky, plural-chinned Harold Simmons Booth and his co-workers at Western Reserve University. Early in their experiments it appeared that in boron trifluoride, the boron "accepted electrons" (i. e., was the go-between) in forming compounds with certain other elements. Why not with aristocratic argon...
...polygamists were quick to find defenders. Ever since the Mormon Church bowed to the U. S. and forbade plural marriage in the Manifesto of 1890, the penalty for getting caught is excommunication. Mormon officials still find it necessary to deplore polygamy publicly. But a monthly magazine called Truth, published in Salt Lake City, is a spirited defender of the abandoned practice, bolstered with copious quotations from Mormon law, Mormon writ and the sayings of the founders...
...nigger-in-the-woodpile, says Author Adams, first appeared in August 1619. The woodpile was a Dutch man-o'-war, which unloaded "twenty Negars" at the struggling English colony of Jamestown, Va. But Adams knows too much about history to singularize plural causes. Slavery, says he, was only a contributing factor in the widening divergences between North and South. Even in 1700 the antagonism between Massachusetts and South Carolina, "the two protagonists in our tragedy," was already latent. For the "rope of sand" that held the 13 colonies together was substituted a Constitutional chain of iron, which...
...split infinitive is a natural English locution found in the best writers (e. g.. Byron, Carlyle, Browning). Greek used singular verbs with neuter plural subjects: the English tendency to do the opposite is caused by psychological and linguistic forces whose subtlety and complexity Dr. McClenahan probably never dreamed of, and an arbitrary interpretation of which even a trained linguistic scientist might hesitate to attempt...
...Education last week fell that same stern gaze when Dr. McClenahan, a member since 1931, uprose to announce that the Board was "guilty of sending out illiterate reports of its own proceedings." In its published minutes he had found a split infinitive, a singular noun followed by a plural verb...