Word: bic
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...seen anything like it. At least not over something so mundane as a disposable ballpoint pen. Last month, when Baron Marcel Bich sold a fraction of his pen company's 1,500,000 shares to the French public, investors went into a frenzy over Société Bic. On opening day there were offers for 8,000,000 shares, but only 300,000 were made available; the price promptly jumped from $176 to $208. Helped by that rise, Baron Bich's holdings in the company that he controls increased to some $200 million...
Last week the company got a windfall when the French Ministry of Education ruled that the country's 4,000,000 children in elementary schools may use ballpoints instead of the traditional ink pens. It was about time. Bic has become a byword in the schools, offices and households of 96 countries. Nearly a billion and a half Bics are rolled out of 20 plants round the world every year according to company officials; they account for one-third of the world's ballpoint total, and production has been rising 10% annually. Baron Bich has done for ballpoints...
Last summer Vy began buying or starting private enterprises for the army. He wound up with five: the Bank of Industry and Commerce (BIC); Vicco, a builder of bridges and roads; Vi-navatco, a transportation firm; Icico, an insurer; and Foproco, a food processing and canning company. Vy detached from war duties 155 army officers who had business experience to operate these enterprises...
...also tend to dissociate yourself from that which isn't neat and ordered (because your mind is so incredibly ordered). If you have been chewing the top of a Bic pen in your zeal, you would probably leave it behind somewhere, not remembering you need it to cover the pen's point, because you wouldn't believe that such a crumpled thing could belong to the set of objects that had to do with...
Last fall, the show drew crowds with two people together in the Bic or the Square or Joe's Bar--a single theme, clever dialogue, and an intellectual's slap-stick. Borrowing heavily now from the Mort Sahl throw-away lines and the California humor of the Fireside Theater, the new sketches weave in third and fourth parts for stage interlopers, creating a more expansive humor. Dropping in an outsider's irrelevancies make a situation comedy less staged...