Word: means
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...intransigeant annuals of blue bloods and battleships came last week from their respective publishers: the squat red Almanach de Gotha and long blue Jane's Fighting Ships. In recent years, editing the 167-year-old Almanach de Gotha, "genealogical, diplomatic and statistical annual," has been no mean task. Bound by tradition to list only the members of regal, princely and ducal families, the genteel editors have been obliged by a shortage of European aristocracy to fill their sedate pages with such families as those of His Highness Seyyid Sir Khalifa-II-bin-Haroub-bin-Thuwaini, Sultan of Zanzibar...
Famed as leader of "calendar reform" is George Eastman. Last week to his side came Julius Rosenwald's Sears, Roebuck & Co. which announced it will operate next year on a 13-month schedule. To its customers, the introduction of some new month such as "Sol" will mean nothing, but 40,000 employes will have to consult their company's new calendar to learn when payday falls...
...want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics!" So exclaimed Sir James Hopwood Jeans, eminent British mathematician, for the benefit of struggling scholars. But he did not mean the remark literally. It was a sentence he had thought up to help them remember pi (the quotient of diameter into circumference) carried out to the 14th decimal (3.14159265358979) by the number of letters in each word...
...enough, she turned on the gas. Rona was making a good thing out of a stenographic agency, but left it for a temperamental writer. When he finally deserted her, she started another agency. Ida was a rawboned Middle-western farmer's daughter, a hard worker. She married a mean man. When childbirth killed her he wrote a poem to her memory, saying what a good husband he had been. Emanuela was beautiful, but she was afraid of love. Against vigorous opposition, she remained a virgin. Esther married a poetaster: starvation and cold gave her tuberculosis. Bridget was a hellion...
Themes such as death and the beginning of life give Mr. Powys occasion for no mean bit of modern metaphysics. A few of the titles. "The Withered Leaf and the Green" and "The Corpse and the Flea" suggest very much John Donne. At the same time this present-day Aesop keeps his faith with Donne in little thrusts of realism that actually make the reader shudder. All this, as said before, is quite smart: and yet almost as everyday as the "Farmer's Almanac...