Last Word

City editors have a curious tolerance toward flamboyant adjectives which circus press agents think up--adjectives which they would never allow promoters of Brahms recitals or eat-more-cheese weeks to get away with. Last week, with the circus due in town, Manhattan city desks braced themselves for the old bag of superlatives: "astounding . . . prodigious and prodigal plenitude of pageantry." But circus publicists were parading a new and restrained descriptive, born of last season's disastrous Hartford big-top blaze (TIME. July 7). The favorite 1945 adjective: "Flameproofed."

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