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CHESSMANSHIP. The late Stephen Potter, Field Martial of Gamesmanship, conceived this classic chess ploy before Bobby Fischer pushed his first pawn. Challenged, the Summer Gamesman makes three random moves and resigns...
ANYONE who happened to overhear random conversations around the Price Commission last week probably decided that its next report will have to be issued in a plain brown wrapper. The commission's economists were talking about a plan with the multi-entendre name of "re-virgination." At first glance re-virgination would seem to promise a return to a state for which there is little nostalgia. The idea is that, at the commission's urging, corporations would roll back many of their recent price increases and make refunds to customers who had been forced to pay them. That...
Pidgin. That theory receives its first book-length substantiation with the publication of Black English (Random House, $10). In it, Linguist J.L. Dillard of the University of Puerto Rico describes how slaves were forced to develop their own lingua franca because traders usually separated groups speaking the same language in order to hinder communication and thereby prevent revolts. The slaves taught each other pidgin varieties of their masters' language...
...Everybody dies," says a hustler in Body and Soul, one of the most memorable of all films about boxing. In Fat City, one of the least memorable, we watch a stifling process of human degradation symbolized by the desperate, random violence of tank-town prizefighting. Fat City is about a bunch of losers dying in spirit by slow, murderous inches. It lacks any substantial portion of compassion, however, any shred of insight to lift it above the level of a slumming expedition...
...Services has made an updated study and reports his findings in the current A.M.A. Journal. Prout selected 172 graduates of Harvard and Yale, all of whom had rowed at least once in the four-mile varsity race between 1882 and 1902; for each oarsman, a classmate was picked at random for comparison. Prout agrees that oarsmen seem to develop slow-beating "athlete's heart." But the oarsmen lived, on the average, at least six years longer. The 90 Harvard crewmen lived to an average age of 67.79 years, as against 61.54 for their nonrowing classmates, while the 82 Yale...