Word: smalleness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Whims & Fig Leaves. This has been achieved in spite of rather than because of the industry, which is skittery and as subject to sudden sinking spells as any industry that lives to satisfy woman's whim. Its 11,000 employers are mostly small businessmen who must move rapidly and warily in a trade that is bitterly competitive, determinedly rapacious. A man with a design idea and a batch of orders can have a Cadillac and an establishment on Riverside Drive in six months. Then, like a gust of wind in a wheat field, women's minds change...
...planners had figured wrong: Britain was hungrier for candy than they had thought, and supplies on hand soon ran out. The new ration was the same as before: four ounces a week. To Britain's melancholy moppets that meant a couple of four-inch chocolate bars or a small bag of gumdrops...
...travesty is complete when the mantis makes her kill: "With the sharpness of a spring, the toothed forearm folds back on the toothed upper arm; and the insect is caught between the blades of the double saw . . . Thereupon, without unloosing the cruel machine, the mantis gnaws her victim by small mouthfuls. Such are the ecstasies, the mystic meditations...
...seek one another and fly precipitately the moment they touch, as though they had mutually burnt their fingers ... At times there is a violent tumult; a confused mass of swarming legs, snapping claws, tails curving and clashing, threatening or fondling, it is hard to say which. All, large and small alike, take part in the brawl; it might be a battle to the death, a general massacre; and it is just a wanton frolic...
...Small-boy admirers of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History sometimes call it "the dead zoo." Parents, too, gape and gawk at the floodlit glass cases which the museum describes as its "natural habitat groups." In the shadowy "North American Mammals" wing are windows overlooking a family of grizzly bears dining on ants in Yellowstone National Park, wolves loping after a deer by the glow of northern lights, bull moose fighting in a marsh, and Rocky Mountain goats scrambling sky-high along a cliff...