The Charlotte News

Wednesday, May 14, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: The other pieces of this date were uploaded in 1998.

Someone from LSU wrote a letter praising the perfumed ink of The News, for its orchidacity--not opacity, nor opossuminity, not even its clearly sagacious organicity--not dissimilar, oddly, to the same praise provided by Walter Dixon a couple of weeks earlier. We deduce therefore that both must have seen "In the Heat of the Night" the same May night.

The answer to the letter writer's concluding inquiry, incidentally, appears readily within the pages of Bruce Clayton's 1991 biography of Cash, not without connection to LSU. Perhaps it was this letter which inspired the remark to Cash of which that biography speaks. In any event, you will need to find it for yourself, as we don't give away riddles here, especially purple ones.

The Scotty mickle-muckle magnifier needed to be introduced to the optometrist for correction so as to be able to pick out a pink puckle of pinocle players, finding the physique of the pair in the bezique both refreshing and refined, from a group of melancholic, grotty trapezists trapped inside a trapezoidal mine in Transylvania for the purpose of proving that the finifugal canary suspires in the finifically frugal cavernous confines where fire-damp in the bear-traps accumulates not without blasted accident in the hornblendic schist of bituminous rhetorical crescendic sforzando flourishes in the crescentade's puissant phalanx adorned in their pissands marching through the pis aller foryellowed, forwelked, forworped, forwrought in doom.

And what do the post office, Bellevue, Archduke Ferdinand, and tobacco have in common?

Half-Wits

Detroit Psychiatrists Prove What Was Already Clear

In Detroit recorder's court, they got curious about it and decided to test it out scientifically.

They took as the subject of the study 305 persons up for traffic violations. The particular violations were:

Racing red lights and running through them.

Running past stop signs.

Shooting out from curbs in front of traffic.

Whipping recklessly around corners on green lights.

Running away from the scene of accidents.

Driving with bad brakes.

The 305 persons involved in these cases were handed over to the psychiatrists, and what emerged?

Why, that people who do these things are of low mental capacity, and that most of them are on the borderline of feeble-mindedness.

We knew that already, of course, but it is comforting to find science proving it by intelligence tests.

Maybe when it has been proved on a large enough scale, even State legislatures will eventually get around to confessing that would-be drivers ought to be made to submit to intelligence tests to get a driving license, and that these borderline cases who endanger the lives of all of us should be rigidly refused such license.

Site Ed. Note: But were the hemiest of them in Chevys or Fords, Chryslers or Studebakers? Volkswagens?

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