Word: worded
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Late one night last week, four Chinese Nationalist cops strode into the shabby living room of Kung Teh-pai, editor of Nanking's National Salvation Daily (circ. 15,000). Without a word, stubby, rugged Editor Kung, who has well earned his reputation as China's most outspoken editor, reached for his hat. After 25 years of writing what he thought - and eight previous arrests - Kung knew what to expect. He told his wife: "You can reach me at the prison." The day before, Kung had written a long, angry editorial accusing retired President Chiang Kai-shek of "manipulating...
...circus, ain't it?" grinned Umpire Jocko Conlan as he looked over the Brooklyn Dodgers' training camp at Vero Beach, Fla. Some observers disagreed: it reminded them more of Willow Run or an Army basic training center. Whatever the word for Vero Beach, Dodger Boss Branch Rickey, the foxy grandpa of baseball, had brought mass production to spring baseball training...
...help to define a word, the word culture ... to rescue this word is the extreme of my ambition." So says Poet-Critic Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1948 Nobel Prizewinner, in the opening pages of his new book. But the reader who thinks this modest pronouncement means that dignified Poet Eliot is going to settle down to a donnish little tussle with Noah Webster had better brace himself for a shock. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture Eliot advances a view of present-day western civilization that is as pessimistic as his famed post-World War I opus, The Waste Land...
...grasp its hopeless message; and even those who furiously reject Eliot's thoroughly reactionary and dogmatic conclusions will be bound to agree that he has forced them into the healthy exercise of having to think furiously, too. Eliot's Notes starts by challenging people who use the word "culture" without ever pausing to think of what it means. To the average citizen, culture is a handy catchall into which to dump the arts, education, plumbing, science and any other pursuits that seem to be elements of modern civilization. To some philosophers it plainly represents "an interest...
Thus, says Eliot, is the grand total of the word culture smashed into bits and pieces of semitruths. To reassemble it and grasp its full significance, he insists, the western world must first realize that all aspects of culture are not only related to each other but must overlap and interlock in such a way that they form a living whole...