Word: cranks
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...only solution to the affronts handed the citizen by manufacturers, service industries, government bodies-and, yes, neighbors-is for more Americans to complain more loudly. One complainer can easily be dismissed as a crank or a fussbudget, but the power of the complaint grows mightily with numbers. The burgeoning consumer organizations have discovered that millions of Americans want desperately to complain, but have kept silent out of either fear of rebuff or a sense of futility. The organizations have given the citizen the happy feeling that he has found a sympathetic ear and also relieved him of the awkward burden...
...crank's view, if anyone wants it: I am sick of carnography, of sitting safe and watching meat fly. On the screen or on the page. But don't Moby-Dick and Hamlet also end bloodily? And isn't the reader/viewer always a voyeur...
Miraculously, no one was injured in the rash of bomb planting, some not the work of Gomez but probably inspired by his example. (Airport switchboards across the country were flooded with crank calls of false bomb threats.) Gomez himself gave the location of the TWA bomb that was found, warning that it was on Flight No. 7, which had just taken off from New York for Los Angeles. The plane hurried back to Kennedy Airport and was emptied; then two sniffer dogs trained to smell out explosives boarded the ship. It was their first live test, and one of them...
...once and I pulled it out and pointed it at the guy and good thing for me he backed down. If he'd've come at me I would've stood there dry-snapping it at him. You just don't have time to crank one in when you need a piece, is all." Higgins may do for "is all" what Salinger's Holden Caulfield did for "and all" in The Catcher in the Rye. Still another Boston locution is the proliferation of the word "there," uttered as often and as meaninglessly as "well" elsewhere...
Died. Gene Austin, 71, "granddaddy of all crooners," who sold more than 86 million records in the era of crank-up phonographs; of lung cancer; in Palm Springs, Calif. Austin began his career as an entertainer by pounding bawdyhouse pianos. After a stint in vaudeville, he moved to the recording studios of RCA Victor, where his drawling tenor made hits of tunes like How Come You Do Me Like You Do? and Ramona. His biggest success, My Blue Heaven (1927), became his theme song...