Word: pseudo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Soviet scientists lost face with their free colleagues a few years ago when they were forced to support pseudo-scientific theories that conform to Communist orthodoxy. Many scientist sympathizers, including Britain's Professor J.B.S. Haldane, broke with the Russian line over the dogma that Trofim Lysenko's sloppy genetics teaching (i.e., that environment is the big determinant in the development of life) is the only true doctrine. it was widely predicted that subjection to such authority would seriously damage the morale of Soviet scientists, and that the ill effects would soon show up on the practical level...
This atomic-age potboiler appears to make sense to its adolescent audience. Many adult viewers are soon lost in its trackless, pseudo-technical doubletalk ("Forty-seven degrees inclination, speed seven miles per second; temperature calibrated at zero three; interior pressure stable at nine oh nine"), or by the sudden mid-program appearance on Captain Video's "Scanner" of a five-minute stretch of western movie. Du Mont's Vice President James L. Caddigan, who created Captain Video in 1949, explains: "The western is there to give us the pace and action that...
...Okefenokee Swamp and call themselves "nature's screetures." Pogo himself is a wide-eyed, naive little possum, and his pals include a raffish, cigar-smoking alligator named Albert; Porky Pine, a gloomy realist; Churchy LaFemme, a turtle and a reformed pirate captain; Rowland Owl, a nearsighted, pseudo-scientist who once tried to invent an "Adam Bomb"; a prideful hound named Beauregard Bugleboy; and a fantastic menagerie of feathered, furry swamp characters. Together they romp and fuss, conversing in a vaguely Southern dialect that drips with puns and nonsense verse: "Oh, the parsnips were snipping their snappers/ While the parsley...
...steam in 1950 and remained a bestseller all year. It gave way, finally, to Dianetics, a gelatinous porridge of poor man's psychoanalysis which was originally dished out, appropriately enough, in Astounding Science Fiction. Equally astounding, and to many critics equally fictitious, was Immanuel Velikovsky's pseudo-scientific Worlds in Collision, an explanation of mythological and Old Testament miracles that turned academic scientists from coast to coast purple with wrath. It made bestseller lists along with Gayelord Hauser's irresistible promise, Look Younger, Live Longer (by eating vegetables, yogurt...
With such reflections in his head, Francis Stuart has been reconsidering the life & times of himself and his I.R.A. friends. Redemption, a feverish search for a new "breadth of understanding," is the product of that reconsideration. Though written in the overwrought, pseudo-prophetic manner of D. H. Lawrence's later novels, it is a fascinating book. Its central character, a tempest-tossed Irishman named Ezra Arrigho, has spent the war in Germany and has just returned to Ireland to settle down in a little town. What can he say of it? Scornfully, Ezra decides that most of its people...