Word: dropper
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nation's labor force for the transition to high-technology industries. After visiting the Eire Pub "men's bar" in the Dorchester section of Boston (he took just one sip of his Ballantine ale) and discussing business problems with a group of executives, he uncorked a jaw-dropper, suggesting that abolishing corporate taxes might be a good idea. "When are we going to have the courage to point out that in our tax structure the corporate tax is very hard to justify?" he asked. Others have suggested before that taxing both business profits and the dividends paid...
...estimate that men acquired individual names about two million years ago, and ever since, the species has persisted in abusing this innovation through a single insidious practice--name-dropping. My friends and I are awfully distressed by this vicarious form of status-seeking and so, to nip incipient name-droppers in the bud, here is a stage-by-stage account of the development of a name-dropper...
...second stage, the name-dropper refers to the dropee in such a way as to imply a certain amount of intimacy between the two. The link may be as tenuous as "I was at a party with Suzanne Somers" or "Donald Sutherland walked into the drugstore while I was buying aspirin," but the speaker associates himself in no uncertain terms with the name he drops. I could never get over the way Woodward and Bernstein used to skirmish this way: Bob would tell Carl he saw Frank Perdue on the bus; Carl would tell Bob he nearly ran Rod McKuen...
...name-dropping, the afflicted person has pretty well crossed the line beyond which there is no rehabilitation. He will drop names until he drops; he will never get through a sentence without a gratuitous reference to a celebrity of his acquaintance. For by the fourth stage, the name-dropper's sense of propriety and modesty has disintegrated to the point that he refers to his friends by their first names alone. I know these people so well, the fourth-stage dropper says, that it would be unnatural for me to refer to them by their full name...
Finally, after years of dropping, after checking the phonebook for first names, after making nicknames out of nicknames, the name-dropper touches bottom--the tragic fifth and last stage. For at the fifth stage (I remember when this happened to Kate Hepburn), the name-dropper slips into near-unconsciousness and drops names instinctively without realizing it. (Ringo keeps telling me he's trying to stop but I just don't believe him) Nor do the references make any sense whatsoever: they become for the dropper as (God, I hope things work out for Theda) vital an element of speech...