Word: bulling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Birk, 54, the company boss since 1981, announced he would step down July 1 as chief executive officer to make way for the firm's president, William A. Schreyer, 56. The move reflected troubles in the Merrill Lynch herd. Only about a year ago, the Merrill Lynch bull was snorting with satisfaction. Propelled by a booming stock market, company profits for the first half of 1983 jumped to $239 million, 3½ times as high as in the same period in 1982. But since then the bull has been hit by lances from all sides. In the fourth quarter...
...Angus bull, the long, tall kind, from Jim Hawkins' farms." The stranger put down the newspaper, took Chester Hickle's knife and whittled like a fool...
...outside things like money or status," a lesser descendant of that definitive rogue-genius Gulley Jimson, hero of Joyce Gary's The Horse's Mouth. For a man who claims that most of his life has been "a flight from boredom," Scum has an amazing tolerance for bull-session profundities. Scarcely a page goes by without an interpolated haiku-like verse (WE WEAR OURSELVES INSIDE OUT/ TRYING TO BRING THE OUTSIDE IN) or an observation like "The truly most valuable product of this planet is people, loved people...
William G. Perry Jr., professor of education emeritus, wrote a very clever essay defining types of examsmanship. A student who has just received an "A" on an exam objects. "But sir, I really don't deserve it, it was mostly bull, really." To this kind of remark, there is only one possible rejoinder. Alfred North Whitehead's: "Yes sir, what you wrote is utter nonsense, utter nonsense! But ah! Sir! It's the right kind of nonsense...
Perry used the vernacular "bull" to describe a style where one analyzes a problem and thinks constructively about it's purpose even though one is short of facts. Perry called the answers that the "fact knower" writes in his bluebook "cow" answers--lists of appropriate facts which just don't add up. Perry's metaphors of cow and bull may help to characterize approaches you used when writing in bluebooks. The true "a" comes with the integration of cow and bull answers...