Word: ciphering
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...negative, mostly clownish. Archie Bunker, who now owns a bar in Archie Bunker's Place, philosophizes that the best way to cut the crime rate in half is for every person to shoot one criminal; Dry Cleaning Mini-Tycoon George Jefferson of The Jeffersons emerges as an intellectual cipher, trapped in matriarchy. Even when businessmen are written into a plot on a one-shot basis, they are, in most cases, up to no good; only 6%-three of 49-were presented in a favorable light...
Feel like a cipher in a computerized society? Long to be remembered for some bit of individuality? A Seattle firm, Quiring Monuments, will accommodate you. Last year some 1,000 customers, double the number in 1979, ordered personal designs etched into their gravestones, taking advantage of a technique developed in recent years. A few other firms are also beginning to use it. Says Vice President David Quiring: "People come in with a sketch of what they want. We stencil it, cut it into rubber, and using sandblast grains, we can make a fine, detailed picture" on granite...
...inert stone of Khlestakov, the young visitor, sending violent waves through everyone else's life but remaining happily, passively at rest himself. Mark Linn-Baker seems deliberately to make no more and no less of this character than Gogol did--which is to say, nothing, a personality-less cipher whose every action either fulfills the most hollow expectations of societal conduct or moves inertially towards a well-fed rest. Unable to choose, he mechanically makes love to both the mayor's wife and daughter--two primped peacocks immobile on a divan--until, deciding in a characteristically inverted way that...
...pair of "tuned chickens." But the fact is that what Peter Sellers told Kermit the Frog on The Muppet Show may be as frank a public statement as he can make about himself. It reveals his profound fear that the real Peter Sellers, at 54, is virtually a cipher, that he has no personality and that he will either not be able to find or will at the last minute lose whatever fictive creation he has chosen to wrap around himself...
...life, a larger-than-life life. But Jerry Ford comes from a different mold--he fell into his job. He made it to the top the way officers advance in the Army: he got along by going along. And that meant being a cipher...