Word: fobbed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...available, they are usually so shoddily made as to be almost useless. Two enormous hangars in the Johannestal airport are crammed with $75 million worth of textile products that nobody at home or abroad will buy. (After Ghana and Guinea turned them down, the East Germans tried to fob them off on Communist Hungary-which indignantly returned the whole lot.) The state-owned shoe industry was recently forced to burn 25,000 pairs of sandals that were unmarketable...
During his 60 years, Gary Cooper learned to punch cows (at 13, on a ranch owned by his father, a Montana State Supreme Court justice), to draw (as an art student at Iowa's Grinnell College), to hunt, ski and skindive, and to fob off reporters with half-caricatured one-yup-manship. Some critics have said that he never bothered to learn to act. Actors who have worked with him say this: no one ever stole a scene from Coop...
...himself as nothing more than "a greasy-thumb mechanic type of fellow." And there is William Shockley, who with two colleagues (John Bardeen and Walter Brattain) earned a 1956 Nobel Prize for creating the transistor?that hugely useful little solid-state device that has made possible everything from the fob-sized portable radio to the fantastic instrumentation that the U.S. packs into its space satellites. Shockley, who uses a yellow legal pad instead of a blackboard to draw his scientific diagrams, says candidly: "We simply wouldn't start the research if no application were seen...
...woke up with a hangover in the Union Army. Scholar Russell is well dug in behind about 500 footnotes and a bibliography of 259 items, but perhaps the reader should look for the odd bits: the unforgettable character who used his slain enemy's ear as a watch fob; the horse thief who won Bill's admiration by running 18 miles barefoot through snow and prickly pear; the U.S. Cavalry troop with which Bill rode and whose main commissary item was a five-gallon demijohn of whisky and Old Tom Cat gin; the Indian called Young Man Afraid...
...reporter bears little resemblance to his predecessor. He knows his subject and often brings to it, as in the case of Ben Fine (who holds seven honorary and one earned doctorate degrees), actual experience in teaching. At an educators' conference several years ago, when one speaker tried to fob off some phony statistics on teacher-student ratios, the assembled reporters not only challenged them but were able to show where he was wrong...