Word: taproots
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When public schools ban the Bible to duck religious controversy, they recklessly cut off a sturdy taproot of secular culture. To measure the cost, English Teacher Thayer S. Warshaw of crack Newton (Mass.) High School devised a 112-question quiz on simple Biblical allusions, sprang it on five classes of bright, college-bound juniors and seniors. In The English Journal, he reports the result: a sobering case of "cultural deprivation...
...Berling family pride. It has never been a great paper, although consistently a good one. Created by royal dispensation, it remained stubbornly loyal to the throne, even after 1904, when the government began printing a newspaper of its own. But time has long since stranded Tidende's taproot conservatism; successive mass movements to the political left have forced the paper into the role of minority voice. Today a Radical-Liberal coalition is in power, and instead of swearing daily allegiance to the throne, Tidende finds gentle fault, taking circumspect swipes at the high cost of a welfare state, plumping...
...foothills of Rumania's Transylvanian Alps 35 miles from Bucharest, Ploesti was called by Winston Churchill "the taproot of German might." From its oil refineries came one-third of the aviation gasoline, benzine and lubricants that kept Adolf Hitler's military machine running. To protect Ploesti from air at tack, the Germans had made it into a colossal land battleship. A ring of heavy antiaircraft guns formed a perimeter around the refineries that circled the city; lighter flak guns were concealed in hay stacks and groves, mounted on factories, bridges, water towers and church steeples on the target...
...Taproot in Tradition. To provide stories for these heroes and for their dozens of less famous fellows. Hollywood keeps 100 or so writers busy. (One of them, Frank Gruber. once wrote four scripts in four days.) A great many of the shows have shoddy plots, ludicrous situations. They are "shot from the hip," as one director puts it, in three days or less, "take what you get." Studio filmed for the most part, they are ironically known in the trade as "four-wall westerns-as big as all indoors." It hardly seems the sort of climate in which creativity could...
...despite all its vulgar errors and commercial excrescences, the western story has given television something that it seriously lacked: a taproot in the American tradition, a meaning beyond the moment. And television has given the western story, the youngest and most prodigiously alive and kicking of the world's mythologies, a fresh chance to express itself, and to change with the times...