Word: racket
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Historian-Educator Jacques Barzun can be a mean critter when aroused, as he has been of late by contemporary prose (a "mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax"). Higher Learning (he could find only "an immense amount of Lower Learning" in the U.S.), and the Ph.D. racket (TIME, Nov. 25, 1957). In American Scholar Barzun castigates his latest victim: detective stories, which, he says, have fallen on evil days, turning increasingly into "novels of haze and daze...
Students reaction, however, is not so unanimously favorable. As one Senior, not in the program, puts it, "I can be either a racket or the most valuable thing at Yale." The program has received sharp criticism not only of its ideals and requirements, but also of its admissions policy and even its title...
...racket shows are slowly disappearing. They have run out of rubes, and they are about to run out of towns. "I just think show business is dying out," says Colonel Alter's wife Helen. "You can't get good freaks any more. Seems like they're all dying off." Lew agrees. "They take 'em and put 'em in an institution now," he moans. "They don't went 'em exposed. Now I ain't going to mention any names, but I know an insane asylum where there's three good pinheads right...
Maidens & Dhows. Gwadar was then the haunt of pirates and pearl divers. Later, in the iQth century, its freebooters prospered by procuring black-eyed Persian maidens for sale in Arabia's slave markets. The British, lords of India and protectors of Muscat, ended this racket. Since World War II smuggling has been Gwadar's chief industry. As the new republics of Pakistan and India, trying to husband their precious foreign exchange, clapped stern restrictions on luxury imports, the enterprisers of Gwadar took to their dhows to keep Karachi's shops well filled with the restricted items. When...
...stepdaughter-the fumbling, phony-paternal tenderness, the elaborate scheming, the agony of longing which Author Nabokov manages to make at once ludicrous, terrible and utterly convincing. But in the end, as Humbert tells the event, "it was she who seduced me . . . Modern coeducation, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved...