Word: basic
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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Utility. Dr. Sheldon declares that though people may put on or lose weight as they grow older, their basic physique types do not change. Thus weight tables which give "normal weights" against height and age, without regard to structural type, mean less than nothing. Example: A heavy woman of type 632 frets because she thinks she is 30 Ib. overweight, whereas she is actually 30 Ib. underweight for her type and ought to stop dieting at once...
...Basic Materials: Aluminum, antimony, asbestos, chromium, cotton linters, flax, graphite, hides, industrial diamonds, manganese, magnesium, manila fibre, mercury, mica, molybdenum, optical glass, platinum group metals, quartz crystals, quinine, rubber, silk, tin, toluol (coal-tar derivative used in TNT), tungsten, vanadium, wool...
During the next eight years this world-traveling don busied himself mainly with a movement regarded by its enthusiasts as one of the hopes of world order: the propagation of the international language called Basic English (TIME, March 12, 1934, et seq.). A simplified English devised by C. K. Ogden, containing only 850 words but capable of expressing practically any idea, "Basic" made great headway in the middle '30s. Not only did students in many countries find it easy to learn and use, but English and U. S. writers discovered that translating their thoughts into Basic never failed...
Last autumn, when it appeared that Europe was beyond Basic for the moment, Ivor Richards shifted his field. With a Rockefeller Foundation grant of $10,000 a year for five years, he returned to Harvard, brought together several of his most brilliant followers, including a winsome, 24-year-old Chinese girl named T'an Pin Pin. One of the first things they did was to arrange with station WRUL, Boston, for daily, half-hour broadcasts in Basic English on short wave for Latin America. These broadcasts (news reports, features, a daily lesson in Basic) have gone on all winter...
...next autumn, however, Ivor Richards plans an extended program. He and his colleagues have completed a primary text of Basic English for Spanish-speaking peoples which will be published by Houghton Mifflin. They have also completed a first-year primer with a Portuguese text for Brazil. Two of them, Mr. & Mrs. Robert Tucker, left last month for Quito, Ecuador, to establish there a Basic English School and to study the results of next autumn's broadcasts. This school will have a competitor, for there is already a well-subsidized German school in Quito...