Word: portent
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...swart, striking young Emir Saud, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and smoldering-eyed son of that kingdom's tall, ascetic founder and autocratic ruler, His Majesty King Ibn Saud. As usual, the Buckingham presentations were of no significance, but men who know the Near East saw a sign and portent of British prestige in Arabia's great new State as its Crown Prince took his respectful stand near the Queen-Empress...
There is no graver portent in American life today than the determined effort to create a 'red' scare and exercise a censorship over our colleges and universities. If this campaign of terrorism and hysteria should succeed it would sound the death knell of academic freedom everywhere. Censorship by government, such as ruined the German universities overnight, is dreadful enough, but censorship by an irresponsible press which stops to dishonesty, trickery, and deceit to achieve its ends and by self-appointed super-patriotic guardians is worse; for that means censorship, passion, and prejudice and the beginning of an academic lynch...
...henhouse in the quiet Ozark village of Couch, Mo. (pop. 59) last week, Mrs. Henry Bennett found an egg imprinted with the phrase: "Here my word 35." Viewing this as a religious portent, Mrs. Bennett told her neighbors about it. A wave of excited piety overtook Couch. To Mrs. Bennett's home went visitor after visitor, to emit fervent prayers. When, in a fit of devout jitters, a female preacher dropped the egg and broke it, Mrs. Bennett succeeded in gluing enough pieces on another egg so that the words were still visible. Said Mrs. Bennett...
...DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE-William Saroyan-Random House ($2.50). Last week a new writer appeared on the U. S. horizon. Not much bigger at first sight than a man's hand, this portent promised a change of weather to come, perhaps even a cyclone. All that had happened was a book of 26 "stories" by one William Saroyan, 26-year-old U. S.-Armenian. But readers of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze opened their eyes at his Preface: "A writer can have ultimately, one of two styles: he can write in a manner...
...that at her greatest she could not cast it off for essential reforms. Her one move that might have stood out in the history of English theatre, her encouragement of Boucieault came to practical naught in "The London Assurance." She is really no more than a forerunner and a portent. Her history is interesting to the biographically minded and to specialists. This version of it shows up incidentally but rather well, the stodginess of the reviewers in the earlier nineteenth century, the nearly complete lack of public taste, and the banality of stagecraft Despite its deft writing...