Word: shaking
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Your Dec. 17 account of the proposal of the name shake for a unit of time equal to one-hundredth microsecond was interesting, but tended to leave the impression that such minute intervals are a very recent phenomenon in physics . . . During the war, in order to avoid using the somewhat revealing word "microsecond" in telephone conversations, it was dubbed the "dollar" in one section of the Manhattan project, so that what is now a shake became a "penny." The "jiffy" has been used for one ten-thousandth of a shake and probably for other short intervals...
...term millimicrosecond is in common use to denote one-tenth of a shake, but a more picturesque name was suggested by Dr. J. W. Keuffel (then a student at CalTech). Since this is very nearly the time taken by light to travel twelve inches, he proposed that it be called the "lightfoot" by analogy with the common astronomical unit, the "light-year"-which is, of course, a measure of distance and not of time...
...veteran Hearst editor who left twelve years ago, worked for NBC, also did public relations. Lee Ettleson, former executive editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, moved over to run the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, and more changes are in the offing for Detroit and other cities. But the biggest shake-up of all came to the American Weekly, once the brightest jewel in the Hearst diadem...
...play, but all year investors scrambled to buy "growth" stocks. Investors were not betting on the prosperous present so much as on the even more prosperous future. Not even war scares or the inroads of new taxes on profits gave Wall Street more than a momentary quaver. After every shake-out the market climbed right up again. At year's end it was close to the peak and seemed to be gathering new strength...
...split-second technicians have taken over an old slang word to describe their work. In the language of the laboratory, a shake is now a precise interval, meaning one hundred-millionth of a second...