Word: tangent
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...childhood debut as a violin virtuoso, Jascha Heifetz, 58, will soon expand his previous teaching activities, be a full professor of music at the University of California at Los Angeles. He will teach pupils who will get no grades, credits or medals for their showings. Why this new vocational tangent? "Violin playing is a perishable art," explained Heifetz. "It must be passed on as a personal skill; otherwise it is lost." Then Heifetz fondly recalled his old violin professor in czarist Russia: "He said that some day I would be good enough to teach...
...backstage visitor, Actor Ralph Bellamy, starring on Broadway as the young F.D.R. in Dore Schary's Sunrise at Campobello, perked his jaw at a bold tangent, managed a practiced facsimile of the famed face-wide grin. On hand to size up the miming: South Carolina's retired Democratic Governor James F. Byrnes, 79, whose memory of spats with the boss he once served seemed mellowed: "I understood Mr. Roosevelt's feelings about politics. But it is inevitable when you have a political difference with someone that people attribute bitterness to it. Bitterness is a popular word...
...more likely solution takes off at a tangent from sex. The obstacle, in this view, signifies adolescence. The spontaneous sex life of the rabbit embodies all that men (especially Americans) fear of this period. Hence the obstacle takes the form of a rabbit--a large rabbit. In support of this position it has been pointed out that one trait of American women is to keep small stuffed animals--tigers, dogs, and rabbits--long after they cease to be children. These stuffed animals, it is felt, represent efforts to avoid the adult role. To cling to these animals is to deny...
...Tangent or Great Circle? To build a track straight and level enough for missiles was a technical tour de force. Air Force experts selected a section of the Tularosa Basin, near Holloman, that is almost as flat as a frozen lake. While figuring theoretically how to lay out the 35,080-ft. track, they considered making it perfectly straight both up-and-down and sideways, but gave this up because the curvature of the earth (the earth considered as a sphere with a 4,000-mile radius) would require either a cut in the ground 35 ft. deep...
Soon the debate was dizzily racing off on another tangent. New Hampshire's Republican Styles Bridges, president pro tem of the Senate, recalled that Bohlen's supporters had said that a three-man committee of venerable career diplomats-Joseph C. Grew, Norman Armour and Hugh Gibson-had recommended Bohlen. He now had definite word that Gibson did no such thing. Within a few minutes, Illinois' Everett Dirksen had something to add: he had left the Senate floor and telephoned Mr. Gibson, who confirmed exactly what Bridges said...