Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...student of American history or literature this course is essential, and for the harassed scientist looking for some easy, though enjoyable manner by which he may pass off his literature requirement it may be taken without the fear of spending one's time in the drudgery of uninteresting reading...
...your issue of April 3, one of your correspondents tells a story about a lovely long word invented by a scientist to represent "the complete sound caused by the sudden entry from above of a large stone into a deep pool." As a matter of fact the word pompholygopaplilasma (for that is the correct transliteration) was invented by the comic poet Aristophanes, and may be found at 1. 249 of his play The Frogs. It is made up of pompholyx which means a bubble, and paphlisma which means a frothing or foaming up. Hence the Aristophanic compound represents the sound...
...knowledge of organic chemistry is necessary for any good scientist, no matter what the field, and especially for medicine. Besides being a necessity, this course holds a certain fascination. It consists mostly in the description and preparation of hundreds of organic (carbon-containing) substances, with formulas sufficiently complex and yet obedient to laws to make excellent puzzle-problems. Working these formulas on paper has indeed been likened to playing with anagrams and cross-word puzzles...
Your quotation of Ezra Pound's asthmatic attempt to reproduce on paper the sound of a waterfall (TIME, March 20) recalls to my mind a told-as-true account, which appeared in the Boys' Own Paper during, I think, 1920. of a scientist who spent some weeks, or months, chucking big stones into a deep pool, then listening carefully. At length he gave the world the following plausible and quite delightful word, as representing accurately the complete sound caused by the sudden entry from above of a large stone into a deep pool...
...Armament was permitted only to the I. A. police. Popular government, individual liberty were anachronisms in this sternly centralized system. And though peace & prosperity were everywhere, here & there the old superstition of liberty still lingered on. Individual hotheads got nowhere, however, till young David Knox, greatest scientist of them all, took a hand in affairs...