Word: croppers
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Stranger-Trouble. Novelist Taylor comes a cropper in dealing with the handsome stranger-a psychotic who is a good deal more dangerous than Camilla at first suspects. Mrs. Taylor suggests facets of his character, all neatly and plausibly, but no individual emerges. At the climax of the story Camilla is filled with understandable terror at learning that her new friend is a murderer. The motives and behavior of the young man at this point are, however, by no means made credible to the reader. The novel ends rather helplessly with his suicide...
...public-opinion pollsters, said President Truman on Election Day, "are going to be red-faced tomorrow." He was right. Not since the Literary Digest fiasco of 1936 had opinion-samplers come such a cropper...
After three years of practice, Gallup had assured himself that polls on toothpaste and politics were one & the same. He was also convinced that the famed Literary Digest poll was heading for a disastrous cropper. The millions of Digest postcards were mailed on the basis of telephone and auto registration lists and took no account of the low-income voters who had swung solidly behind the New Deal...
Actor Basil Rathbone, 55, came a painful cropper. His black police dog, Maritza, snapped the leash while the two were strolling in Manhattan's Central Park; Maritza leaped a high wall and dashed into Fifth Avenue traffic; Rathbone tried to follow suit, fell over the wall, broke his left wrist, and fainted. Skipped: one performance of the Broadway hit, The Heiress. Thereafter he villainized with his arm in a cast...
Hand-to-Mouth. British industry was in no holiday mood, either. "If there is any letup in production," said Sir Stafford Cripps of Britain's export-or-die program, "we shall come a cropper in a year or two." The export goal, 175% of 1938 volume, had looked close last July: exports were up to 120%. But by November they had slipped to 117%. And last week, due to lack of coal, the export program was well on its way to coming a cropper...