Word: bafflegab
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...first appeared more than 80 years ago, when investors found that they could often trace - and turn a profit from - the operations of stock-market manipulators by keeping running graphs on the price and volume of trad ing in individual stocks. Today's chart ists have created considerable bafflegab, but they have also devised some simple patterns by which to follow the swings of the smart money (see chart) and watch for new patterns. Among the com mon signs of change...
...comes "Mrs. Parkinson's Law," aimed at the harried housewife who hopes to keep both her sanity and her spouse: "Heat produced by pressure expands to fill the mind available, from which it can pass only to a cooler mind," goes the latest Parkinson principle. What all that bafflegab means, says Parkinson, is that when the lady of the house feels like blowing her stack, she ought to hie herself next door for a chat and a cup of coffee instead of waiting to explode when her husband gets home from the office...
...S.B.P.P. has aptly obscure origins but appears to come from a Royal Canadian Air Force listing of fuzzy phrases. It was popularized in Washington by Philip Broughton, a U.S. Public Health Service official, who circulated it among civil servants and businessmen. A sort of mini-thesaurus of bafflegab, it consists of a three-column list of 30 overused but appropriately portentous words. Whenever a GS-14 or deputy assistant secretary needs an opaque phrase, he need only think of a three-digit number -any one will do as well as the next-and select the corresponding "buzz words" from...
...weeks ago. Then, in an address to the Supreme Soviet last week, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko declared that Moscow was "ready for an exchange of opinion" on the missile issue. Said Gromyko: "The current revolutionary epoch is doing away with the traditional concepts of strength." Stripped of Marxist-Leninist bafflegab, Gromyko's speech presumably indicated Soviet discomfiture over U.S. plans to go ahead with an ABM system of its own. Whatever Moscow's motives, it seemed genuinely inclined to slow down the nuclear momentum...
...ticket "to every Southern Governor." When pressed as to his source, Sorensen insisted: "I know he has." Which governors in particular? "Right across the board." The idea of Humphrey putting Lester Maddox or Lurleen Wallace as close to the presidency as the proverbial heartbeat is, of course, bafflegab, and Sorensen himself later backed away a bit from his initial assertion...