Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Beehives & Birds' Nests. Most of the tests are designed to gauge four abilities: verbal ("Which word means the opposite of sad?"); numerical ("One number is wrong in the following series: 1 6 2 6 3 6 4 6 5 6 7 6. What should it be?"); space conceptualization ("Which of the five following designs is not like the other four?"); reasoning ("If Bill is taller than Bob and Bob is taller than Ed, then Bill is what to Ed?"). Some test experts rate students separately on these abilities. "A person is not smart or stupid in general," explains Harvard...
Similarly, the experts have tried to take the "cultural bias" out of much testing. The more a test depends on verbal ability, for example, the more it favors the kid whose parents speak well or who read to him. The Otis all-picture test includes sketches of beehives and birds' nests, which may be more familiar to a country child than to a kid from a metropolitan housing project. Still, the question of cultural bias can lead to equally difficult problems. It may be, as Theodore Stolarz, director of the Chicago Teachers College Graduate School, contends, that IQ tests...
...essentially by myself betrayed--the saving character of a people who have held onto the roots of uniqueness, moral courage, political bravado and intellectual guts provide me today with one solid base to stand on, one place of life worth vitally living, one neighborhood where individual honesty and verbal directness still exist...
...mind boggles. The disc slips. Marguerite Young's phantasmagoric novel of a dream journey across the U.S. contains 1,198 pages. Some phantasmagoric novel! Only a fictional pressagent's verbal weapons could describe it: "Marguerite Young's new novel is so big that if its air conditioning is turned off, clouds form inside. Its electrical system contains 11,425 miles of copper wire. None of it connected. The cement that went into its construction could build Grand Coulee Dam, with enough left over to fill a wash tub into which might be placed the feet...
...think she needs fur ther instruction." "Noel Coward once said that some women should be struck regularly, like a gong," wrote Novelist John O'Hara, 60, in his weekly column for Long Island's Newsday. Accepting the advice, O'Hara proceeded to administer a few verbal thunks to Elizabeth Taylor, 33, who had gotten sore in 1959 about having to star in a movie version of his novel Butterfield 8. The objection wasn't literary, said O'Hara, it was just that M-G-M insisted on her doing Butterfield for $150,000 when...