Word: tiber
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...best of times, and the best of times have been rare. In imperial Rome, orphans were commonly sold into slavery or simply killed off. Although the Roman Catholic Church forbade infanticide, Pope Innocent III was dismayed by the number of children's bodies he saw floating in the Tiber. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, one chronicler reported that orphans "swarmed the streets like locusts," and locusts do not live very long either...
...ingratiating "documentary" novel called The Frog Who Dared to Croak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 182 pages; $11.95). The author, as odd and ingratiating as his book, is Richard Sennett, 39, better known as an omnivorously brilliant professor of sociology at New York University. Sennett's hero, Tiber Grau, finds the folktale version of the frog story "pessimistic" and "not entirely clear." Grau is at this point a propaganda official in the short-lived Hungarian revolutionary regime of 1919, so he has the authority to rewrite the nation's folklore. In his revised version, the frogs croak so loudly...
...these salubrious crystals (sal) is a first cousin to Salus, the goddess of health. Of all the roads that led to Rome, one of the busiest was the Via Salaria, the salt route, over which Roman soldiers marched and merchants drove oxcarts full of the precious crystals up the Tiber from the salt pans at Ostia. A soldier's pay-consisting in part of salt-came to be known as solarium argentum, from which we derive the word salary. A soldier's salary was cut if he "was not worth his salt," a phrase that came into being...
...Democratic Convention in 1968. On CBS, Dan Rather gave an unusually downbeat report on Britain's social unrest, high unemployment and general decline. All three networks interviewed Britons eloquent about problems. Enoch Powell was trotted out, the dour fellow who once warned of a parallel with the river Tiber running red with blood in ancient Rome if "colored" immigration in Britain was not reduced. A Scottish M.P., Willie Hamilton, who thinks the Crown an expensive anachronism and Princesses Margaret and Anne in particular to be parasites, got a long and polite hearing from Ted Koppel on ABC. Glimpses...