Word: uncommonness
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...cent of its entering freshmen from the kind of applicants the study has in mind. Clearly its new President, Mr. John Sawyer, has a sense of adventure and a fine will to experiment. In a field so touchy as admissions has come to be, these are uncommon qualities. It would be a pity if institutions such as Harvard did not soon begin to share them...
East Germans show uncommon imagination in escaping Walter Ulbricht's Communist prison state.* A circus troupe, animals, merry-go-round and all, once drove across to the West as if it were en route to a carnival. One man reinforced the family car with armor plate, then crashed through the Wall with wife and friends as the Communist Volkspolizei fired vainly at them. An East German locomotive engineer opened the throttle and took his whole train to West Berlin. But until last week, no one had found a way of reaching freedom under the very feet of the Vopos...
...print each U.S. edition (circ. 13.5 million) takes a full month. The Digest sells more Christmas gift subscriptions-2,000,000, including renewals-than most magazines have readers. Each year it fields some 1,200,000 unsolicited contributions from readers, pays for some of those accepted at the uncommon rate of $1 a word...
...trouble; it is unreliable in the northern latitudes near the magnetic pole, and most North Atlantic flights are close to the top of the world. Gyrocompasses have a different affliction: they drift slowly from their true reading and require continual resetting. An error of 3° is not uncommon. Uncorrected, it can carry a 550-m.p.h. jetliner 28 miles off course in a single hour, slanting the course dangerously close to the track of other planes...
...have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret out one or two cosmic assumptions of his own; seeing them in your blue book, he can only applaud your uncommon perception. For example, while most graders are politically unconcerned, not all are agnostic. This is an older generation, recall. Some may be tired of seeing St. Augustine flattened by a phrase, or reading about the "Xian myth...