Word: gimmick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...packets are a gimmick that makes quitting more fun," said Maura D. Valle, a UHS health educator. "It's not even a cessation program so much as an awareness program," she said, explaining that organizers hoped that abstaining from cigarettes for one day could lead participants to quit for good...
Smith cited the letters when he offered to use his influence on behalf of at least four corporations, for fees ranging from $1,000 to $4,000. He did not mention that fully 50,000 people had been asked to join the circle in a fund- raising gimmick. After the Washington Post reported Smith's caper, the National Republican Senatorial Committee canceled his circle membership and returned his $1,000. This Mr. Smith did not go to Washington...
...shows are troubling. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is both journalistically superfluous (the gimmick seems to be to repeat the words yesterday, today and tomorrow in each story as often as possible) and dramatically clumsy. A re-creation of the near crash of an American Airlines DC-10 in 1972 featured the original pilot and one flight attendant (now 17 years older) playing themselves, not very convincingly. Another story recounted the ordeal of a woman, nearly paralyzed with cystic fibrosis, who spent 16 years neglected in a mental institution. The piece was light on facts and heavy on sensationalism: the asylum...
...some ways, Goodman's work feels like a gimmick. With her unusual background--growing up in a Jewish home in Hawaii while also spending time in England and then attending Harvard--the author has unique experiences to draw from for her stories. With this kind of life, it seems that anything she wrote would have to be original and thought-provoking. One of the author's characters, a poet and taxi-driver in New York explains this reasoning...
...turning to erstwhile competitors for help with the hype. ABC is running commercials for its fall shows in movie theaters. CBS is stuffing brochures inside boxes of blank Maxell videocassettes. NBC is doing the same with Scotch cassettes. ABC is targeting the VCR user with a more high-tech gimmick: a special bar code in the network's November TV Guide ads will enable owners of specially equipped models of Panasonic VCRs to record certain ABC shows automatically...