Word: gimmick
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...only way to economize is to cut essential services. Whenever a conflict between ethical propriety and financial gain arises, Harvard invariably announces that need-blind admissions--not $35,000 to paint "artistic" stripes on the Quad--would be the first thing to go. By means of an accounting gimmick, Harvard sees that alumni contributions are channeled into scholarship funds, making it seem that every last dollar of alumni contributions is necessary to maintain need-blind admissions. It's an illusion...
...student at Ulysses S. Grant High School in Portland, Oregon, Lauderdale held dinner parties featuring entrees like chicken adobo. Now Lauderdale hosts parties on his own, "because no one else does." They are alcohol-free, but successful because of the themes, he says. "Parties have to have a gimmick if you want to be a star," Lauderdale says...
...centuries. St. Joseph, a carpenter, was handy around the house, after all. The Catholic Church has no objection to such appeals for intercession, but brokers, complained Father James Coen, head of the Catholic Information Center, to the New York Daily News, "are turning this into a first-class sales gimmick." Successful sellers are advised to exhume the statue and enshrine it in their new home. Co-op owners who have no yards may have to pray to someone else: St. Jude, patron of lost causes...
DREAM ON (HBO, various dates). A neurotic New Yorker (Brian Benben) copes with divorce, dating and other modern trials, while scenes from old TV shows rattle around in his head. A clever gimmick perks up familiar material in this engaging sitcom series from executive producer John Landis...
Readers of Scott Turow's previous blockbuster, Presumed Innocent, will know better than to hold their breath for answers. Turow, a lawyer who has kept jurors as well as readers on the edge of their chairs, has a preternatural knack for drawing out the suspense. The gimmick in Presumed Innocent was to follow the mystery through the eyes of the accused murderer, Rusty Sabich, a public prosecutor on trial for the murder of an amorous colleague. The intimate narrative device ensured reader sympathy, even though Sabich waited until the final pages to tell all he knew about the corpus delectable...