Word: sprigging
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...reacted properly to Mark of the Vampire (TIME, May 6) are likely to be even more perturbed by this ugly blossom from the spring's crop of horror pictures. Werewolves are not as eerie as vampires but they are faster, more ferocious and make uglier noises. A sprig of bat-thorn, as seasoned cinemaddicts are well aware, will keep a vampire outdoors. For werewolves, bat-thorn is as innocuous as the parsley on a mashed potato and the only flower that has any effect at all is the "mariphasa," which blooms by moonlight in a valley in Tibet. Taken...
...camels. Troubled by mirages, once nearly dying of thirst when he dropped his waterskin, Hsuan made himself so popular everywhere he went that he had to go on a hunger strike before one Central Asian king would let him depart. An entire chapter is devoted to Ibn Battuta, sprig of a Tangerian family of judges who in the 14th Century visited every Moslem colony in the world. The sedately written narrative is spiced with many a quaint excerpt from the original chronicles, maps and reproductions of old engravings, tid bits of curious information. Sir Percy manifests the complacent chauvinism...
Born 50 years ago in Breslau, Max Born was the first son of Professor Gustav Born, University of Breslau anatomy professor famed for pioneer experiments in grafting tadpoles, and of Margarete Kauffmann Born, sprig of a solidly established family of industrial weavers. At Gottingen he drank the intoxicating elixir distilled by the distinguished mathematicians Hilbert, Klein & Minkowski, was only 22 when Einstein's Relativity turned the universe topsy-turvy. Four years later, a teacher of theoretical physics, he was plunging along the labyrinths opened up by the master (his mathematical treatises include an exposition of Einstein theory), but with...
...Unblooming, it looks like an ordinary ground-palm: a rosette of long, pointed leaves spreading out from a central core. When its time comes it hastily pokes up a huge flowering stalk, thick as a tree trunk, from 15 to 40 ft. high, tops it with a huge cauliflower sprig with hundreds of little white or yellow tubular flowers. After holding this climax for a month, the tall stalk withers, the whole plant dies. Mexicans commonly intercept the climax by cutting out the stalk bud as soon as it shows, hollowing out a basin in the central core. The plant...
...defined the Middle West as: "A place which has no fixed boundaries, no particular history; inhabited by no one race; always exhausted by its rich output of food, men, and manufactured articles: loyal to none of its many creeds, prohibitions, fads, hypocrisies; now letting itself be governed, now ungovernable." Sprig of an old U. S. family with traditions of public service, Wescott was pointed for the ministry, but at twelve he left home (Kewaskum, Wis.) for the more spacious academic atmosphere of West Bend and Waukesha, went on to the University of Chicago, where he headed the Poetry Club...