Word: portent
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...writers. Now producers worry about the shortage of good horses: they are shooting so many westerns that Hollywood stables can hardly keep up with their bookings ($10 a day for an "extra" horse, $25 minimum for a beast with a role). This shift in concern was as telling a portent as any last week when television rounded the bend of its 1957-58 season. It is a season in which network advertisers are spending more than ever-about $660 million a year-to woo the largest audience yet-42 million TV homes-on the theory that, as one CBS bigwig...
History and strategic portent lay around them, bright as the Mediterranean sunshine, as the Marines fanned out widely in five-man teams in accordance with the Corps' new antinuclear tactics of "separation and concentration." Flying in, they had glimpsed the Trojan plains where 3,000 years earlier Achilles fought Hector for mastery over the straits dividing Europe from Asia. Just across the bay from their landing point were the cliffs of Gallipoli Peninsula, where in World War I the British, French, Australian and New Zealand invaders suffered 250,000 casualties trying valorously but vainly to capture Constantinople and open...
...chemicals and spraying equipment picked up in Morocco. As the pungent odor of Hexachlorocyclohexane spread across the land, the invasion was brought partially under control, but an estimated 70% of Tunisia's $8,500,000 date crop had disappeared. For the Tunisians, the locust scourge was one more portent that nothing will be right in North Africa until the Algerian war is over...
...evidence to confirm what every experienced serviceman and ex-serviceman knows: that pride in one's unit is the cement, whether at base, in the line, or in P.W. camps of Korea. "Many servicemen exhibited pride in themselves and their units," the committee reported, discussing the one encouraging portent of the P.W. camps. "This was particularly pronounced where they had belonged to the same unit for years. They stood by one another . . . If a soldier were sick, his fellow soldiers took care of him. They washed his clothes, bathed him, and pulled him through. These soldiers...
When Thomas Mann came to America in 1938, he said simply: "Wherever I am is German culture." To Germans rallying against Hitler, or, like himself, driven into exile, the declaration was a defiant battle cry; to non-Germans it was something of a portent. "The plot of every one of his novels," said a critic, "concerns an organism whose vitality is threatened; one can never be sure whether the crisis will end ineluctably in death or whether it is not instead the critical point in a rebirth." Because the vitality of that old organism Europe appeared to be ebbing towards...