Word: gimmick
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Loan Manager Noreen Lawless got together a list of unfilled menial jobs and began calling up her delinquent clients to offer them work. She had a lot of trou ble making people believe her. "They thought it was some kind of gimmick," she says. "They never had a bank offer to help them out before...
...called the cops. The men explained they were anthropologists from the University of Chicago, anxious to study rich families. "The policeman couldn't believe it," said one of the men. "He looked first for my Encyclopaedia Britannica, then for my vacuum cleaner and then asked what was the gimmick...
...gimmick is that anthropologists, after decades of following Margaret Mead to Samoa and Bronislaw Malinowski to the Trobriand Islands, have staked out new territory-the nonexotic cities and rural byways of the U.S. Indeed, scores of sessions at last month's American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Mexico City were devoted to the problems and rewards of studying U.S. subcultures. These may range from Greek-Americans and company towns to female athletes and Appalachian snake cultists...
...three years ago, when someone decided that a program with "Till Eulenspiegel" and Prokofiev's "Romeo and Juliet" would be much more fun played at midnight. It was a pitch to stonies and straights alike, and was so successful that it was followed the next year with a real gimmick--President Bok narrating an impeccably played "Peter and the Wolf"--which drew an even rowdier and more enthusiastic crowd. The next two midnight programs tried to recapture that success by continuing to take the audience back to its childhood with "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" and "The Young Person's Guide...
Slaughter is a barnacled publicity-getting gimmick used frequently by farmers in bad times. During the Depression, cattlemen killed entire herds because beef prices could not cover costs of livestock shipments. But with the slaughters occurring as they do in the midst of a growing awareness of the world food crisis, the farmers seem to have hurt their cause rather than helped it. President Ford called one Wisconsin slaughter "shocking and wasteful," saying it did nothing to solve the farmers' problem. The Humane Society of the U.S. condemned "the needless killing of any living creature ... for publicity purposes." Some...