Word: backwardation
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Parodies of TIME writing usually begin like "Outraged was snaggletoothed, bilious, ambidextrous Herman Zilch ..." But nowadays TIME editors do not think highly of backward syntax except as an occasional way of emphasizing a point. Spacesaving sometimes forces us to use a string of adjectives to give a thumbnail sketch, but we prefer nouns that make adjectives unnecessary...
...been a focal point for both esthetic and astrological controversy. On at least one point-placement of Zodiac signs and constellations-Designer James Monroe Hewlett came a cropper. As one letter-to-the-editor writer once informed the New York Times: "The ceiling stars were all put on exactly backward. Their arrangement ii a mirror image. . . . This reversal is, of course, as confusing as a map showing New York on the West Coast and San Francisco on the East. . . otherwise, very accurate...
China will need the aid of U.S. money, resources, and engineering skill to complete its Yangtze project. But U.S. aid would not be pure altruism. Such a huge source of power would gradually alter much of China's backward economy, giving her a new capacity to repay the cost, and at the same time making her industries and people customers for U.S. electrical equipment...
...Government officials listened sympathetically. Said Hernan Siles, acting head of the dominant party, M.N.R. (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario): "Land should belong to the man who works it." The crowd applauded. But in backward Bolivia some 90,000 proprietors own the land inhabited by a rural population of 2,500,000. Land reform was still a somewhat remote ideal...
...Tokyo's Aoyama Palace on April 29, 1901. Japan itself was suffering a rebirth. It was 48 years since U.S. Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry had opened the ports of the Land of the Gods to U.S. trade and western ideas. Four years hence Japan would defeat vast, backward Russia and emerge as a foremost Pacific power...