Word: instinctive
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Within the secretive confines of the Navy Department in Washington, a small war went on last year. Shy but stubborn Acting Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison, who inherited the experimental instinct from his great father, Thomas Alva Edison, wanted the Navy to try out small, speedy, motor torpedo boats and submarine chasers. Motored "mosquito boats"* and subchasers did perilous and effective duty along European coasts during War I, afterward were further developed by the British and Italians. Grey, stubborn Admiral William Daniel Leahy, who until last June was Chief of Naval Operations, stuck by his principle that the Navy...
Four Wives (Warner Bros.) increases and multiplies the joys and sorrows of the four daughters (Rosemary, Priscilla, Lola Lane and Gale Page) of old Music Master Lemp (Claude Rains) in a typical U. S. townlet. This time maternal instinct defeats the considerable ingenuity with which, in Four Daughters, Director Michael Curtiz managed to keep cinemaudiences straight about, and interested in, the doings of four leading characters in one picture...
...same symptoms-"rapid pulse . . . labored breathing, dilated pupils, and a euphoristic tingling"-which characterize "all other major passions, such as love, greed, poetry, and the quintessence of them all, religion," Koeves dignifies travel as a "virus," as "a form of poetry whose raw material is life," as "an instinct second only to that of the passion of love. . . . Cities are more docile mistresses than women. Like women, they require time and money; but of the two they are by far the less demanding and more generous...
Generalissimo Gamelin's instinct for caution ("Science and prudence" might be his motto) is certainly greater than Hitler's. And he had something fairly substantial to show for his first 30 days' work. He consolidated enough gains to put his heavy artillery in range of the main West-wall defenses in at least two spots of his own choosing: the Blies Valley (Zweibrücken) and the Lauter Valley sector. He claimed to have surrounded 60 German villages. He had Saarbrikken under control (it was too heavily mined to take frontally), had covered with his artillery most...
...sweep out the stores, sugar was going out the front doors in 100-pound orders. Customers who for years had bought from day to day and trundled purchases away in baby's perambulator carted away canned goods by the case, flour by the 50 lb. sack. The squirrel instinct was at work. With a strange reversion to the memories of World War I, U. S. housewives were building up hoards against a winter which they thought would bring high prices and short food supplies...