Flashback Monday: The Talk of the Town

The reviews are in, and Reston is a hit! In the years after Reston's founding, it got attention from such literary powerhouses as Reader's Digest and Holiday, which called the New Town (tm) "a dream turned into mortar." But that's not all! Time raved about its "handsome modern architecture and quality construction found in few developments today" (just tell that to someone trying to find any two surfaces that still meet at a 90-degree angle in one of those New Townhouses), while American Engineer predicted it would "attract and hold valuable skilled employees" (just tell that to the folks who work for Sprint Nextel, whose corporate bosses found the cornfield allure of Kansas far more irresistible.) But in a sign at how far the basic literary skills of the average newsmagazine reader have fallen since the 1960s, Businessweek attempted a pun that would fall on deaf ears today: "Backed by the drive and fortune of New York real estate man Robert E. Simon, Reston... is, so to speak, a simon-pure new tone, the only one with true lineal connections to the movement."

Get it? Simon -- simon pure? Actually, we don't either. Time to find a dictionary.