Word: floater
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...published a comic novel called Floater that was set in an unnamed newsmagazine. I shouldn't have been surprised at how often I was asked about the extent to which my fictional magazine was really TIME, where I had worked for a few years in the early '60s. Instead of the conventional disclaimer, after all, Floater began with a claimer: "The character of Andy Wolferman is based on John Gregory Dunne, though it tends to flatter. The other characters are fictional...
...Floater, the magazine's Lifestyle section schedules stories on such trends as obscene topiary and the hot new fashion of wearing two-thirds stockings (two-thirds of the way to the knee or two-thirds of the way up the leg or maybe a third missing in patches; nobody seems to know). The writers feel oppressed by an editor they call N.R.F., for No Redeeming Features. The Medicine writer often comes down with the symptoms of the disease he's writing about. Office romances are carried on so discreetly that the rest of the staff becomes aware of them sometimes...
Well, sort of. In that era, TIME did use the term floater to designate a sort of utility infielder who moved from section to section as a replacement writer. The magazine was still rigidly divided into such sections as Education or Sport or Press--a method of organizing the week's news that Briton Hadden and Henry Luce had invented roughly 40 years before. In the jacket copy of my novel, I'd acknowledged that I was the newsmagazine floater referred to as having tried "to escape an overlong stay in the Religion section by writing 'alleged' in front...
DIED. STEVE HAMILTON, 62, Yankee relief pitcher who patented baseball's version of the lob, the "Folly Floater"; of colon cancer; in Morehead...
...Yale's final offensive play of The Game, with the Bulldogs needing a touchdown to put themselves within a field goal in the final minute, Yale quarterback Joe Walland called Compas' number. Walland threw a 16-yard floater, leading sophomore James Borden to the corner of the end zone...