Word: use
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Chop" is pidgin-English for "quick." The Chinese call these implements kwaitsze, literally "the quick ones." The etiquette governing their use is elaborate. To lay them crossed upon the bowl is a sign that one wishes to leave the table. During a period of mourning chopsticks are usually put away, and the mourners eat with their fingers...
...Significance: the radio-wave spectrum being definitely limited, many stations are now forced to use the same wavelengths, going on the air at different hours by agreement. There was a hopeful stir when John Hays Hammond Jr. proved the possibility of sending many messages on a single "carrier" wave upon which modulations were impressed (TIME, Oct. 26). Skala's invention promises to simplify air-traffic even further, to solve the selectivity problem of listeners-in, to open the field of wireless telephony as a substitute for common wire service...
There is clear-headed continuity in the ordering of the book, and also a flippant, strained use of fuzzy words. The historian sees his people motivated by eccentric ideas and insanity. The devil, by the vulgate wording, had much to do with their successes?"hellish and dastardly tests," "devilish ingenuity," "his familiar demon." "For progress, God must send us a few more infernal marvelous searchers of the kind of Robert Koch." He sees them all of a pattern and is frank: "But the stumbling strides of the microbe hunters are not made by a perfect logic, and that...
...thinking is another matter. To a certain extent, loose thinkers are born not to be unmade. There are many people to whom intellectual curiosity concerning an implication they wish to believe, is a positive desecration. On the other hand, to those who are concerned with reaching convictions by conscious use of the syllogism, it will be very interesting to discover the whimsical tricks words can play in the mouths of other people...
Western civilization, be it bathtubian or bunk, is a reality which necessarily had to be analyzed by fictionists before they could use it as a medium for classic expression. The time has now come when the analysis is no longer new, no longer prepotent. Indeed one can easily believe with such critics as Carl Van Doren here and J. C. Squire in England that a real dawn is illuminating the field of American letters...