Word: vane
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Fair & Foul. To a nation that has become a community of economic weather-vane watchers, the Ford signals-now fair and, in virtually the next instant, foul-added to the uncertainty that, perhaps more than anything else, has been the dominating factor in the stock-market plunge that began last February. Contributing to that same uncertainty were various indexes released by the Government last week...
...service copy-or to have the translator read them. Some 80% of reporters' stories are culled from these publications, which divulge big news by small innuendo. "If you're any good at all," says Joseph Michaels, who covered Moscow for NBC, "you get to be a weather vane. You catch a scent, like...
...Weather vanes have a high-blown tradition. In the 1st century B.C., Greek Architect Andronicus capped his Tower of Winds in Athens with a mighty bronze Triton. The rooster atop the church steeple got its official sanction in the 9th century A.D. when the Pope decreed that every church should mount a weathercock to recall the chanticleer that crowed the night Peter thrice denied his Lord. Vane making reached the peak of its popularity as an art form when American settlers took it up. To record their triumphs of style and ingenuity, Manhattan's Museum of Early American Folk...
Paul Revere hooked a wooden codfish above his coppersmith shop. In early Boston, children crowded around on Saturdays in hopes that the gilded Indian gleaming on the Province House cupola would, as superstition had it, shoot his arrow at high noon. In Pennsylvania, a weather vane in the shape of an Indian was meant as an offer of friendship-and hence protection from rampaging redskins. Soon every back-porch whittler and crackerjack craftsman was getting into the act. Weather vanes popped up in the shapes of Uncle Sam, butterflies, locomotives, Gabriel tooting on a trumpet, a haggard country doctor astraddle...
...jiggle at the slightest whiff of a breeze. They were often intricately animated. One, called Farm Industry, made about 1880, shows a long-skirted woman churning butter while her farmer husband, in the doorway of a barn, sharpens his tools on a grindstone. It doubled as a weather vane, churning and sharpening away furiously when the wind rose before a storm. What its anonymous carpenter did not know was that in time he would be looked upon as the artistic ancestor of much more sophisticated turnings in the wind-contemporary mobiles...