Word: pyramidal
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...notion that in the city of Tenochtitlán as many as 20,000 human sacrifices had been made in one ceremony. Victims stood in queues miles long waiting their turns, as relays of beaked and painted priests presided at the altar set up at the top of the pyramid-temples to cut out living hearts with stone knives...
...from our shoes (we refuse to admit defeat by wearing boots), we pondered the 19th century's foolish sentimentality and unrealism. Snow's truer character lay revealed in Ukichiro Nakaya's authoritative "Snow Crystals." Besides the run-of-the-mill hexagonal-plane dendritic form crystals, there are spatial dendritic, pyramid and columnar, bullet, needle and graupel types, to mention a handful. Of especial interest was the Tsuzumi type, so named because of its resemblance to a Tsuzumi, a Japanese tom-tom. It is a hard crystal to describe, but picture a Tsuzumi and you nearly have...
...plus income group (after taxes) today is less than a fifth as large, accounts for only a sixth of the aggregate income it accounted for in 1929, provides only .038% of national luxury income v. more than a third in '29. But while the apex of the pyramid has shriveled, the middle has filled out: there are now 30.6 million families with personal incomes of $4,000 or over who account for a luxury income of $41.4 billion. In the words of a Los Angeles broker: "Before World War II there were at least 50 really big yachts here...
...also a new twist on the old historians' axiom: the more luxury, the quicker a nation degenerates. This was true enough in Babylon, Greece, Rome, Bourbon France and Czarist Russia, where luxury perched atop a pyramid of misery, ignorance and hopeless poverty-Fabergé eggs sprouting from a dungheap. But in the U.S. luxury has come to mean not a declining economy but an expanding one. It is not a historic nightmare but a large part of the American dream. In the words of Ben Franklin, who saw ahead of his time: "Is not the hope...
...never followed up his invention. That remained for Frenchman Theodore Gericault, whose Raft of the Medusa (see color) came 40 years later. Critics have made much of what Gericault owed to Michelangelo and Caravaggio, have tended to overlook his connection with Copley. Yet the similarity of composition (a pyramid tilted toward the horizon) and especially of spirit argues for Gericault's having known Copley's picture. Splendid though they are. both Copley's and Gericault's men-against-the-sea-scapes seem as dated today as they once were startling...