Faux Pas

Just as it is a bloomer to talk about the price of sea foods to a man whose wife has died of oyster ptomaine--a faux pas to discuss prohibition in a house recently disgraced by the tippling of its breadwinner--so it is a serious breach of taste to "speak of earthquakes in California. Ever since the geological disaster in San Francisco in 1906, all convulsions of the earth's crust have been referred to euphemistically; people do not say "since the earthquake" but "since the fire." What must be the courage, then, of Dr. Bailey Willis, seismologist and Professor Emeritus of Geology at Stanford University. Last week he declared that within the next ' ten years Los Angeles will be wrenched by a tremor worse than that of San Francisco.

Three years ago he stated that Santa Barbara would be shaken. Last summer that prophecy was fulfilled (TIME, July 6). The earthquake was purely local, and failed to relieve the general strain which pulls at the terrain from Elsinore, to San Gabriel, between which, at an angle, lies Los Angeles. Like Dean Mather of Harvard, who predicts a quake for Massachusetts (TIME, Nov. 9), Professor Willis advises people to prepare for the disaster as they would for a famine or a war.