Word: cruncher
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Patent Sophistry. But competing with Buckley becomes more difficult with each week that he is on-camera. To his peerless rhetoric he is now adding increasingly polished stage business. Just before he delivers a cruncher, his tongue licks from the corner of his mouth, his patrician voice rasps into a lower register. Similarly, the elevation of his eyebrows telegraphs the drop of a guillotine blade. Another Buckley tactic-when the antagonist has the floor-is to close his eyes, as if he is hearing insufferable platitudes, or to raise them heavenward, as if to invoke Aquinas against such patent sophistry...
...when it was coolly received by the critics. David decided that Gleason was malingering, ordered a private detective to sit detectably in a tree outside Gleason's house. After a few days of that, and a few weeks of verbal ping-pong in the press, Merrick cheerfully delivered the cruncher: he announced that since Lloyds of London had agreed to pay him $3,000 for every performance his star missed, Gleason was actually doing him a favor by staying home...
...Gettysburg farm. Scranton knew what was in the wind. But by now he had fallen in love with his House job, had no ambitions about the governorship. Scranton listened politely to Ike, but kept shaking his head. Finally, just as Scranton was about to leave, Ike unleashed a cruncher. "Bill," he said, "this all comes down to a four-letter word-duty...