Word: magic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...assurance that Apollo 11 would make the first moon landing. Apollo 10 was then still a candidate for the mission; there was also the distinct possibility that if problems developed, the attempt would be postponed until Apollo 12, 13 or even 14. "There isn't any big magic selection that goes on for each mission," says Slayton, whose crew recommendations have never been overruled. "It is like every squadron of fighter pilots. You've got a mission to do and you've got so many flights to fly and you assign guys to fly them. It's that straightforward...
...invitation to incoherence, and "The Bridge" is at times incoherent. Crane admitted that in some of his short lyrics the words were chosen in fits of wine-induced ecstasy to the blare of jazz on a victrola. The idea was that the thoughts would blend and fertilize each other magically. Indeed, a few of the individual lyrics have come to seem as imperishable as Blake's. But the magic failed, so the 1920 critics said, when applied to the epic that Crane had it in his heart to write...
Marcel Duchamp lived his life with a touch of magic. He thrived on paradox, and invested contradiction with its own kind of inexplicable logic. His now-legendary Nude Descending a Staircase made him the succes de scandale of Manhattan's 1913 Armory Show. Duchamp responded by giving up painting. Next, he presented an unlikely series of "readymade" objects, including a snow shovel and a urinal, as artistic creations, and saw that idea take root. Then, having shaken the pillars of traditional esthetics, he abandoned art altogether. In 1923, not yet 40, Duchamp settled down to a life of chess...
...familiar quad-riliterals for dramatic or comic effect, but they tend to lose their value through overuse. As George Orwell observed 22 years ago, "If only our half-dozen 'bad' words could be got off the lavatory wall and onto the printed page, they would soon lose their magical quality." That process is well under way. The four-letter pudendicities are now dropped casually into cocktail conversation. But not everyone applauds the fading of the magic...
...prerogatives of the other two branches of the Federal Government and of the states to aggressive protection of the rights of the individual." Leon Friedman, co-editor of a forthcoming history entitled The Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1789-1969, describes the change in another way: "The magic thing that the court has done is to have initiated a new moral sense in the country, a direction that the legislative and executive branches of government had failed to take. The Supreme Court used to be the anchor of the ship of state. Now it functions as the rudder...