Word: snark
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lewis Carroll Handbook, by Roger Lancelyn Green, lists no fewer than 561 memorabilia on or by the enigmatic Oxford don. The Alice adventures and The Hunting of the Snark have given the language a host of full-blooded words such as chortle, galumphing and burble. Learned Carrollian treatises include farfetched Freudian analyses, one of which purports to show that Dodgson suffered from a "reversal of unresolved Oedipal attachment." In the untidy, inventive White Knight, who of all Carroll's characters is the only one who shows affection for Alice, scholars see a self-caricature. Some commentators think that...
...which most of the solid Victorian absolutes of Truth, Goodness and Progress have faded like the Cheshire Cat. There is no more devastating comment on Marxist myth than the White Queen's "Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday-but never jam today." In his wildest escapades, whether hunting the Snark ("They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care:/They pursued it with forks and hope;") or playing croquet with flamingos as mallets and hedgehogs as balls, the moral of the mythology is that all pretensions and dogmas turn, like the Red Queen, to pasteboard. As Dodgson wrote...
...budget-whacking day in 1949, the Air Force cut off $90 million worth of Northrop orders. By the time Tom Jones came on the scene, Northrop had only two projects of size, both precariously experimental: the F89 fighter and the winged Snark, the nation's first intercontinental missile, which was exploding so regularly that birdmen joked wryly about "the Snark-infested waters off Cape Canaveral." Time and again, Air Force procurement officers threatened to cancel the Snark if it failed just once more, and to scrap the F89 if it turned up just one more...
Jones chose to regard Northrop not as a collection of product lines but as a storehouse of skills. Though its F89 and Snark rapidly became obsolete, Northrop, in building them, had become expert in the fields of guidance, communications, fire control and optics. Tom Jones, steadily moving up through the Northrop hierarchy, recommended sweeping changes to exploit the company's spectrum of esoteric knowledge. By the time he took over the presidency from Collins in 1959, Northrop had become subcontractor to the whole space age, had even erased the word "Aircraft" from its corporate title. "It made much more...
Bailing Out Astronauts. Most fruitful fallout came from the Snark. A refinement of the Snark's star-tracking guidance system now helps to guide the Polaris-firing submarines and the Air Force's air-to-ground Skybolt missile; it will also ride on the Project Ranger moon shoot and the Project Mariner probes to Mercury and Venus. "Ultimately," says Jones, "the same technology will serve on long-distance airliners and ocean liners." Work on the Snark also convinced Jones of the need for a pulse-taking computer to run a continuous inspection on every missile. From that experience...