Word: notion
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Sunshine & Dew. Automobile makers and owners used to think that the worst enemy of a new car's gleaming coat of lacquer was sunshine. Chemist Ralph J. Wirshing of General Motors investigated this notion, found it false. Experiments in Florida showed that a car's paint job suffered most from midnight to noon, least from noon to midnight. Wirshing suspected that dew was the enemy, confirmed this by experiments with artificial dew produced in a "dew box." For some unknown reason rain is much less harmful than dew. Moral: keep cars sheltered at night, even in summer...
...achieved a mild Broadway and cross-country success last year. While his characters lounged on soft settees gulping highballs for three acts, Behrman argued that playwrights whose talents run to comedy should stick to their typewriters in times of crisis, leave world-saving to professionals. So original was this notion that audiences gladly sat through two and a half hours of inaction...
...Hitler let the British down; nothing happened. There grew up the curious notion that they could win the war "comfortably." Sacrifice on a national scale was not asked, hence not made. For eight precious months Britain slept on, until there was a rude noise in Norway...
With this view Ernest Simmons, onetime Harvard professor and biographer (1937) of Byronic Poet Alexander Pushkin, has little patience. Simmons denies the widespread notion that Siberian exile altered the thought and method of "one of the most original novelists in world literature." Dostoevski's originality combined 1) his distrust for Western European culture; 2) his belief in feeling against reason; 3) his expert, unprecedented child psychology; 4) his caustic satire, especially of radicals in The Possessed; 5) his great character types-the Meek, the Double, the Self-Willed...
When Marco Pallis first went to India in 1933 he was mainly interested in climbing mountains. He climbed some. He also debunked the notion that Europeans can scale the great Indian peaks only with the help of platoons of native porters. In his spare time he drank buttered tea and, with a companion, played Bach's Two-part Inventions on viols...