Word: polyglot
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...Singapore last week, the British took the longest step towards self-government in 136 years of colonial rule. They staged the island colony's first really representative general election. In steaming heat, the Chinese, Malayan, Indian, Eurasian and European people of polyglot Singapore (pop. 1,200,000) went to the polls, where six political parties contended for 25 seats in a new Legislative Assembly, the winner to form a Cabinet and take over Singapore's internal administration-subject only to the veto of the British colonial governor. Often trailed by as many as four interpreters speaking Singapore...
...spite of its international prestige, it has never lost its early sense that the city is its "proper place," nor has it forgotten that its special character is largely a matter of location. It is an Ivy Leaguer minus the ivy, an ivory tower without ivory, a polyglot campus of brick and stone that still draws two-thirds of its undergraduates from a radius of less than 100 miles. Its bicentennial theme-"Man's right to knowledge and the free use thereof-is wide as the world; but the university's own official title is still proudly local...
...Polyglot See. The principal entrance to the grounds of Istanbul's patriarchate is a door that is never opened. Before it, in 1822 the Ecumenical Patriarch Gregorius V was hanged on the orders of Sultan Mahmoud II, who accused him of conspiring with the Greeks in a revolt against the Ottoman Empire. For generations, the Closed Door was an Orthodox shrine to the ancient enmity. Under Athenagoras, the door is still closed, but now, as an Orthodox official recently explained: "The Closed Door is a memorial for a dead Patriarch, not a reminder of the way he died...
Hard-working Athenagoras labors long hours to keep up with the affairs of his polyglot see (he speaks Greek, Turkish, English. French, Russian and Spanish), sleeping and eating little, making himself accessible to almost anyone who wants to see him. He maintains close contact with his old friends in the U.S., among them ex-President Harry Truman. Even his sharpest critics acknowledge that his political sense has accomplished much for Greek-Turkish relations. Says one of them: "Athenagoras is not essentially an ecclesiast or a scholar. He is a religio-politician. But I must admit that...
Fifteen pretty girls brought their carefully catalogued charms and mountains of luggage to London last week and, in a polyglot babel of perfumed chatter, settled into a once-quiet, family-type hotel just off the Strand. One of them was destined to become Miss World...