Word: productive
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...mind like blotting paper," British Lexicographer Eric Partridge once said. In the past dozen years, he has blotted up enough odd facts about words ("It becomes a dreadful habit") to fill a Dictionary of Slang, a Dictionary of Cliches and a Dictionary of the Underworld. Last week the latest product of his addiction was on U.S. bookshelves. Name into Word (Macmillan; $4.50) was a colorful catalogue of "proper names that have become common property...
...example, multiply a 16-digit number by another number just as long, subtract something from the product, square the result and add something to the square. From time to time it refers to tables of figures imbedded in its memory, selects the proper figure and includes it in its calculations. It remembers intermediate figures for a fraction of a second, uses them when needed, and then rubs them out like chalk marks on a blackboard. It does all these things and more, without mistakes, faster than a human being can jot down a single figure. When the machine is through...
...this excellent idea, which less skilled hands might have reduced to farce, the British moviemakers have spun a tight little comedy of pure gold. Like Scotch whisky, it is a peculiarly British product with strong transatlantic appeal. Filmed entirely in the Hebrides, where the faces are as roughhewn as the landscapes, its comedy is rooted in character-both national and individual-and nurtured gently with ingenuity and unfailing good taste...
Bundling is the subject of "The Pursuit of Happiness," by Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall, and it is on this play that "Arms and the Girl" is based. The new product has a rowdy, bumptious book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields and Rouben Mamoulian. It calls on Nannette Fabray to play a girl who tries to win the American Revolution singlehanded, but succeeds only in causing complete confusion. Her mission brings her to make clever use of her bed in times of crisis--with and without a large, saw-toothed "bundling board." Miss Fabray has plenty of assurance and ability...
Poor "Lizzie" Peabody. "Busybody" might have been a better name. She was such a congenital, selfless do-gooder, almost too perfect a distaff product of New England's 19th Century intellectual flowering. As a child of four in Salem, Mass., she was already envious of Neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister Ebe, who was six and reading Shakespeare. Twenty-nine years later (1837) when future brother-in-law Nathaniel published his Twice-Told Tales, Liz sang his praises so busily that Hawthorne got tired of her. Once during the Civil War when Liz decided that Abraham Lincoln was running...