Word: gimmick
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...weeks at a luxury vacation condominium or resort at 50% below regular rates every year until 2016? Sounds like the grand prize behind the sequined curtain on some TV game show. Actually, it is a fairly typical example of the kind of arrangement available through a holiday-financing gimmick called time-sharing that is stirring interest among budget-minded vacationers...
Until fairly recently, the French did not take the telephone very seriously. Successive governments scrimped on expansion; from 1935 to 1968 almost no new equipment was installed. As late as 1962, the French Secretary of State for Posts and Telecommunications blithely dismissed the phone as a "gimmick." Charles de Gaulle would not even tolerate a telephone in his presidential office at the Elysée. His successor, Georges Pompidou, had a single phone on a side table but rarely used it; one of Pompidou's aides reportedly got only three calls from him in nine years...
...some innocents (a mother and two children) captured by some baddies (in this case lunatic political terrorists) and sequestered where they are rescue-proof by conventional means (a deserted monastery on top of an isolated peak). The whole idea is to make an improbable -and cinematically novel-rescue gimmick a logical necessity, and in this the scriveners succeed...
...FIRST, Tango seems to be just another avant-garde play with a gimmick. In this case the cute twist is a generation-gap role-reversal. The older members of the family are non-conformists and the young son is a traditionalist. By the time act one comes to a close, the audience feels as if it's being hit over the head with this witty, bizarre, but tediously predictable pattern...
...Wheels. A favorite gimmick to avoid police harassment is to set up shop outside city limits. Eighteen massage parlors just over the city line of Tucson, Ariz., were raided last June by Pima County police. Since then, five new ones have opened...