Word: augean
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...particular Augean stable that 9to5 organizers have taken on, the muck lies deep. Change is slow in coming. The winner of 9to5's "Pettiest Office Procedures Contest" last fall was a man who had his secretary sew up a rip in the seat of his pants while he was in them. ("Men's egos are bigger today," he later explained to The Boston Globe. "Men want that little bit of security that a good secretary provides.") Second prize went to a store manager who asked his clerks to dress up as bumble bees to attract customers into his store...
...funny. Even to Legman they are shocking. "The book is full of material so disgusting that it will make any decent, clean, healthy person want to throw up," he declares. Why then did he spend 41 years collecting and writing the text that accompanies these Augean sweepings of the human psyche? Legman tells us that he began his harvest as a teen-ager in Scranton, Pa., where he was born in 1918. "I got myself in the habit," he recalls, "to top my own father, a notable teller of tales." The psychoanalytically inclined may draw their own conclusions...
Cleaning up the Charles River is like cleaning up the Augean Stables: some folks think it can be done, but so far, mere human agencies haven't quite managed...
...DALE'S national director, arrived in Gary last month, he described the situation as "bordering on civil anarchy." He was not far from wrong. The police department, which has, to say the least, a checkered history, has not done all it might to clean up Gary's Augean stables. At one point, a police detective literally whisked away a prime suspect from the grasp of federal agents and tore through the town with him at 85 m.p.h. Earlier this year, another officer was indicted for perjury; instead of suspending him, the town's civil service commission promoted...
...Spring, Md., last May, the doctors' immediate concern was a bullet lodged somewhere in Wallace's abdomen. To probe for that bullet, the surgeons made a vertical incision, beginning just below Wallace's rib cage and extending along his right side. What they found was an Augean mess. Before the missile came to rest in the muscles of Wallace's abdominal wall, it had blasted through his intestinal tract in several places, splashing undigested food into the abdominal cavity. To clean this out, the doctors lifted Wallace's intestines out of the body cavity...