Word: clunk
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Last words are supposed to be a drama of truth-telling, of nothing left to hide, nothing more to lose. Why, then, do they so often have that clunk of the bogus about them? Possibly because the majority of them may have been composed by others - keepers of the flame, hagiologists, busybodies...
...verdict was manslaughter. Abbott had been acting, the jury decided, under "extreme emotional disturbance." Sentencing comes next month. A judge of Solomonic gifts might condemn Abbott and Mailer to be shackled together with molybdenum chains, inseparable ever after, like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, to clunk, snarling, from one literary dinner party to another...
...properly scaled down. Some carefully planned comic routines fail to connect because of gestures that are too large, movements too exaggerated, timing off. When Rosalind decides to flee the court with her confidante, the women give a victory whoop that flies into the air and then falls with a clunk on the stage...
...reason different. "I don't want the bubbles," she spouts. "I hear they contribute to cellulite." New York Times Columnist Russell Baker does not admit to that particular worry, but he still weeps over the popularity of these waters: the nonalcoholic beverage, he argues, is sounding the last clunk of the ice cube for that most American of social events, the cocktail party. Baker dryly predicts worse to come. "Next year perhaps we will see rooms filled with people holding glasses of mouthwash." Before America reaches for a Listerine-and-lime, however, Boston TV Pundit Charles Kramer predicts...
...ownership of bullion by U.S. citizens. Nixon already has legal authority to permit Americans to own gold, and Simon said that he hoped to recommend that the President do so "before the end of the year." The prospect may please citizens who find something reassuring about the clunk of bullion in their mattresses, but owning gold is hardly the inflation-proof investment of popular mythology. Indeed, U.S. speculators will discover that the market for gold is as erratic as those for silver, cotton and potatoes...