Word: portentous
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Watchers of the U. S. skies last week reported no comet or other celestial portent. In Manhattan no showers of ticker-tape blossomed from Broadway office windows, no welcoming committee packed the steps of City Hall. No call to nation-wide thanksgiving was sounded by Nicholas Murray ("Nicholas Miraculous") Butler. No overt celebration marked the day with red. Yet many a wide-awake modern-minded citizen knew he had seen literary history pass another milestone. For last week a much-enduring traveler, world-famed but long an outcast, landed safe and sound on U. S. shores. His name was Ulysses...
...wispy sickle moon slid through the heavens over Peiping one night last week, eclipsed the planets Saturn and Venus, left them glowing balefully red. To some yellow-robed Buddhist monks conducting sombre ritual in Peiping's ancient, dilapidated Lama Temple, the eclipse was an ominous portent. They twirled their prayer-wheels uneasily, muttering the potent Buddhist charm: Om mani padme hum ("Hail to the jewel in the lotus flower"). Three nights before, some 1,000 miles to the southwest of Peiping, the great Dalai Lama, Venerable Ocean Treasure and Jewel of Majesty, had gone to his Nirvana, aged...
...compulsory thirty-hour week for industry. In the process of its legal fruition it has fortunately struck a snag and there is every reason to believe sweeping changes must and will be effected in it, for as it is now constituted, this opus of Mr. Black is of serious portent to both labor and any economic renaissance...
...yellow light, which reflected eyrily from Memorial's gray and blood slates into the oaken garret. The Vagabond turned from the casement to the dark and empty chimney corner and lighted the lamp by his deep leathern chair; the scurrying forms occupied by nothing, the sight of Sever's portent walls, ugly without benefit of age, called in him a longing for life, for knowledge, for power, and love, ere it were too late. In the distance was the rumble of vernal thunder. Starting the old fellow from his melancholy reverie came a knocking, one, two,--three. He rose hastily...
...during which their power over Congress and the country had been practically supreme. The great dam they had built against the "liquor traffic" had cracked, they were helpless to stem the ensuing flood. Their six-vote victory over Repeal in a nominally Dry House was a portent of defeat in the coming Wet one. The Wets, on top for the first time as a result of the election, did not exult too loudly. Responsibility was sobering even the most rampant anti-Prohibitors...