Pomona people
5Cs
.*amp.*
1989
Etymology
100
Pomona alum Jennifer Doudna ('85) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 for her work on this gene-editing technique
What is CRISPR?
100
This 5C is a mens' business and pre-law college. Oops, did I say "is"? I meant "was"
What is Claremont McKenna?
100
This wine, which under strict rules of appellation can only be made in a specific region of Europe, was nicknamed "the devil's wine" because it made bottles explode
What is champagne?
100
These 1989 protests, also known as the June Fourth Incident (liùsì shìjiàn), captured international attention through a harrowing image of a lone, still-anonymous person holding shopping bags facing down a line of tanks, and resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilians massacred
What were the Tiananmen Square Protests?
100
This name for a two-piece garment comes from a Pacific Ocean atoll where atomic bombs were tested, due to "an analogy of the explosive force of the bomb and the impact of the [clothing] on men's libidos"
What is bikini?
200
Adam Bowen ('98) co-founded this company and briefly was a billionaire before various FDA regulations forced multiple writedowns of the value of this company, whose name is homonymic with a term for a precious stone
What is JUUL?
200
This building on Pomona's campus, which was designed by the same architect who designed Huntington Library, was built by the parents of a Pomona student in memory of her, after she died in 1907 as a junior
What is Mabel Shaw Bridges Hall of Music (Little Bridges)?
200
This word, which was first used to describe Princeton's grounds, comes from the Latin root meaning "flat land"
What is campus?
200
The referent of the sentence "Mr. Gorbachev: tear down this wall!" was indeed torn down in 1989
What was the Berlin Wall?
200
This editorial symbol's name, commonly used to denote an addition to a text (but now more commonly used to mean "to the power of"), comes from the Latin carere (meaning "to lack")
What is caret?
300
This author and professor, whose work Brief Interviews with Hideous Men John Krasinski tried (and failed) to make an adaptation of, wrote Infinite Jest and died tragically of suicide in Claremont in 2008
Who was David Foster Wallace?
300
This Pomona building now shares a name with a Dickens character in Great Expectations, after people found out about the unsavory past of the previous namesake
What is Estella?
300
This piece of paper, a type of which a 1765 British act which contributed to the Revolution required to be placed on other pieces of paper, now costs about fifty-five cents
What is a stamp?
300
The first commercial implementations of these companies, who are perhaps best known today as the kind people who send you the letters saying please kindly stop pirating movies, were founded in 1989
What is an internet service provider?
300
This word comes from an 1838-9 trend that made acronyms out of common phrases with deliberate misspellings — this one from the phrase "all correct"
What is OK?
400
This avant-garde musician, who enrolled in Pomona as a theology major but dropped out after two years and who composed a piece called 4'33", said of his college experience: "I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left."
Who was John Cage?
400
This 5C, which was founded with money from a newspaper baroness, had a now-defunct newspaper founded in 1931 called The Scripture
What is Scripps?
400
The noun of this word has diverse meanings, including: "a short introductory passage of music," "the upper part of a shoe," and "a seductive woman who uses her attractiveness to exploit men"
What is a vamp?
400
This building, built in 1989 and torn down in 2020, shares a name with a weather event, which seems to be just as extant in Claremont as the building now is
What was the Rains Center
400
This physics word comes from a passage in Finnegans Wake: "Three ___ for Muster Mark! \ Sure he has not got much of a bark \ And sure any he has it's all beside the mark"
What is quark?
500
In the Scorcese film "Taxi Driver", the title character attempts to gift this Pomona alum's album "The Silver Tongued Devil and I" to a love interest
Who is Kris Kristofferson?
500
This Pomona admin (the "Dean of Women"), after whom a building on South Campus is named, invented the sponsor program
Who was Dean Jessie Gibson?
500
What is glamping?
500
This serial killer, who was executed by electric chair in 1989, was described by his own lawyer as "the very definition of heartless evil," and is the subject of innumerable media portrayals (including the 2019 Netflix docuseries "Conversations with a Killer")
Who was Ted Bundy?
500
This originally Arabic word comes from the word kohl, a kind of dark powdered makeup, which medieval chemists extended to the volatile liquid that produced powders
What is alcohol?