Word: gearing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other force is Gear Freakery. This is almost exclusively a male obsession, perhaps because a lot of gear has vaguely military associations (guns, of course, are gear). A definition is elusive, but a wristwatch that just tells time is not gear. A wristwatch that also reads out altitude and barometric pressure is gear to make a grown man whimper. L.L. Bean sells one made by Casio...
Makers of tennis and golf equipment are the quintessential competitors in the gear market: their sports are so difficult to learn that most players spend their lives gazing wistfully up at mediocrity's underside. Repeated discouragement, of course, leads to repeated equipment purchase. But gear possibilities are poor; you don't really want moving parts or a liquid crystal display on a racquet or a three wood...
...answer is to provide a gearlike association, the way sports shoes have done by gluing on wildly colored pieces of leather and rubber, supposedly of different density and (nifty gear wording here) torsional rigidity, so the shoe looks like a machine. Prince, the firm that in 1976 invented the big, fat tennis racquet for big, fat weekend players, brought out a big-head "Vortex" racquet three years ago. It was the latest in a triumphant evolution of big racquets made of ever more exotic materials, including graphite and boron, and similar alarming materials. The Vortex was made...
...Some gear actually does work a little better than the earlier models it is supposed to supersede. At Easton Aluminum's big test lab in California's San Fernando Valley, techies have succeeded in stiffening the "flex" of an arrow's aluminum shaft by thirty-thousandths of an inch. Result? A faster arrow and reduced wind resistance. But after radical sports-gear breakthroughs (big-head tennis racquets and golf clubs, high-back plastic ski boots), the improvements are marginal and often largely cosmetic. Mountain bikes, for instance, are madly popular everywhere, but they are not really all that useful...
...economy stays in low gear and inflation remains dormant, further rate drops could keep the bulls running on Wall Street and create another frenzied wave of mortgage refinancing. Before interest rates plunged in recent years, homeowners clung to a rule of thumb that said people should refinance only when rates fell at least two percentage points below the interest on their existing loans. Under that formula, the gains from lower mortgage rates would exceed the closing costs on the refinancing. But today banks and mortgage brokers offer so many refinancing options that canny rate surfers can replace their mortgages...