Word: popular
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...each side of tentative dividing lines would meet separately to pick an electoral college which would register its choice. Punjab Sikhs would be split if the Punjab split. In the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress Party controls the Government but 93% of the population is Moslem, a popular referendum would be held. The likely choice: Pakistan. Bengal, with its rich industrial nucleus of Calcutta, might choose to stand apart as a separate nation, part Moslem, part Hindu...
Billy picked up the art of songwriting in his own brash but methodical way. He spent three months, nine hours a day, in the New York Public Library dissecting hit songs of the previous 30 years. All popular songs, he cunningly concluded, fell into well-defined categories: 1) love songs, 2) nonsense songs, 3) jingles, 4) songs built around a silly syllable. Of these syllables, Billy discovered, the double-o sound-"oo"-was the most successful. On this principle, he carefully constructed some sound effects called Barney Google ("with the goo goo googly eyes"). Just as his calculations had indicated...
...green macaw. In 1924, he got still another source of income: the Backstage Club, a little "speak" which he established over a garage on Manhattan's West 56th Street. Billy's shows, which were bingo-bango-bungo stuff even in those early days, soon made the club popular with the better type of bootleggers and gangsters of the Prohibition era. Joe Frisco was M.C., and to sing his song. Billy hired a chorus girl with a voice as hot and blue as a gas flame-Helen Morgan...
...days a week for 25 years, Anne Campbell has been turning out pieces like that, rarely any better and seldom any worse. She has been at it indefatigably since 1922, when the News began to look around the city room for someone to offset the already popular Poetical Guest. The searchers for talent could find no one with the same flair for carefully chopped meter, the same tin ear for prosody, and the same big heart. Anne heard about the search from her husband, George Washington Stark, then News city editor (and now a columnist), cried...
...Witch in Time. Sharp practices, thefts, murders were often promptly confessed by the evildoer when he heard that the local white witch was on his trail. It was this popular, pagan confidence in witchcraft that caused the Church to fear it like the Devil himself. On the European continent, a steady procession of harmless men, women and children went to terrible deaths as witches. In England, where religious problems were less acute, and the authorities considered witchcraft more a criminal offense than a heresy, the record was not so dark. Torture, to extract confessions, was rarely employed, and Author Hole...