Word: tangents
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...years after the Civil War, when the U.S. needed engineers and mechanics more than ever before, M.I.T. had no time for the cultural preoccupations of the liberal-arts colleges. While neighbor Harvard was enjoying the Golden Age of William James and Santayana, M.I.T. was off on a tangent of its own. It was the first U.S. college to have a department of meteorology, .of chemical, architectural and electrical engineering. It was the first to require its students to have regular laboratory instructions in physics and chemistry...
...Glory that was Greece" is a classic example of the worst type of college "humor." Setting off on a questionably clever tangent, it deals, in a jazz improvisation, with Penelope and Odysseus, referred to as Penny and Odie...
...perfectly manipulated anarchy of Decline and Fall, at once playful and lethal, was peopled with a rout of sinister caricatures tagged with unforgettable names (Waugh is probably the most inspired creator of synthetic surnames since Charles Dickens). There were Lady Circumference and her numskull son, little Lord Tangent; Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Margot Metroland) and her son, Peter Pastmaster; Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Viola Chasm. This glittering, blandly selfish, pretentiously stupid upper-class riffraff was to romp through most of Waugh's later books, sharing their futile power for pointless and appalling mischief with such later...
...showed a burst of energy last week. The President grappled with the problem of the nation's debilitated military strength. The State Department moved on a new tangent into the mess of the Middle East. In collaboration with Britain and France, U.S. policymakers outsmarted Russia at Trieste. Meanwhile, some private citizens seized upon and wielded a propaganda weapon which might be as sharply effective as anything so far contrived in official quarters...
...kept the conversation in whispers for fear of waking Count Tolstoy, who was asleep in the next room. "He's like this all the time," Turgenev explained. "He has come from his battery at Sevastopol, is staying with me, and has gone off on a tangent. Sprees, gypsies, and cards every night; then he sleeps like the dead until two o'clock...