Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...shone brightly over Buckingham Palace for their Majesties' second presentation garden party of the year. "It's a plummy peach of a day, isn't it?" said chic Peggy Douglas, wife of U.S. Ambassador Lewis Douglas, in the diplomatic tea tent. As for curtsies, the 100-odd Americans mingled with the 5,000 Britons at the party found it hard to get close to royalty. Mrs. Adele Vercoe, who is an old hand at such functions, having lived in England on & off for years, managed a quick bob before the Queen Mother. Tish had to content herself...
John Gielgud, who has played Hamlet 1,000-odd times, decided at 43 that he is now too old to act the role any more. He reasoned: "If you take 43 as Hamlet's own age, that makes his mother 60 at the very least. . . and no woman of 60 in her right mind is going to carry on around Elsinore the way that Gertrude of Denmark does...
...House sent out copies of the old exam to teachers from York, Pa. to Fort Worth, Tex. It was a tough one; the school kids in Springfield, Mass, who took the examination 101 years ago averaged only 40.60% in spelling, 29.40% in math. In the past eight months 20-odd schools have given the tests. Even though some words were beyond their ken, 1947-5 boys & girls batted 44.68% on such items as accessible, chirography, descendant and evanescent. In math they scored 52.16% on such questions as this: "There is a certain number, one-third of which exceeds one-fourth...
...last week most French journalists were ready to agree that 40-year-old Pierre Lazareff is the closest thing to genius in the French press. The weekly Point de Vue dubbed him "Napoleon of Journalists." Lazareff's successes were indeed Napoleonic. In the 30-odd months since he returned to France (after almost four years as a war exile in the U.S., where for a time he headed the French radio section of the Office of War Information), he had put together a more formidable empire than he had before...
With the registration of the eleven hundred-odd men who are expected to file through Memorial Hall today the College will conclude the major part of its preliminary activity for what is to be the last regular Summer Session--for some years at least. Hereafter the June to September ratrace will revert to its pre-war form in which it was chiefly an opportunity for spinsterish school marms to sip a few heady draughts from a traditionally masculine fountain of knowledge...