Word: toms
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Hazing in school and college has lately been reported extinct, or at least obsolescent. But "Tom Brown's School Days" seemed recently to have been resurrected, when the news came of a suicide in an English school as a result of too much bullying. An over-sensitive boy, "ragged" by his schoolmates to the point of desperation, flew into a rage and stabbed himself...
Perhaps finger-print signatures are almost as ancient as those of the cross, plain and simple. Pirate stories abound with descriptions of contracts, signed in blood by solemn imprint of the fingertip--or, more often, of the "massive thumb". Tom Sawyer's famous compact has been an inspiration to many a romantic youth. And artists, from time immemorial, have used the finger-print as a personal signature on drawings and paintings. But in spite of so honorable an ancestry, the idea of compulsory finger-prints seems to be meeting with some opposition...
...Thus, by the two boys Milton Perkins and Jerry Sawyer, was the now famous 'Tom-cat' started on its beneficial career...
...there any rhyme or reason in sanctioning Shakespeare, Milton, Gibbon, even the Bible, in whose pages may be found "foul and indecent" passages? They too have been censored in the past. In fact, to put the shoe on the other foot, the Parisian authorities once, banned Fielding's "Tom Jones", to the righteous glee of Richardson, who had never forgiven Fielding for his burlesque on "Pamela". But today we accept classics in English as they are, dirty and not washed behind the ears, if you like, but still themselves, uncensored. To discriminate against such classics because they happen to speak...
With the Renaissance came a new knowledge, the reading of text-books and the study of great literatures whose effects are being felt today. All that can go now. The time has come for a wholesale abandonment of such clumsy apparatus. No more taking of English 29 to read "Tom Jones"; no more French 2 to help pass the Reading Knowledge Examination; they all must go. Thus decrees an eminent authority--the Moving Pictures...