Word: goop
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ever since they arrived in Medford, Ore. in 1949, ex-Navy Pilots Harvey Brandau and Eugene Kooser have been stirring up clouds of trouble. Flying war-weary fighter planes, they have been "seeding" the thunderheads over Rogue River Valley with a secret formula they called "goop." According to the fruit farmers who have hired the flyers, the seeding causes rainfall and prevents crop-ruining hail. But many of the valley's hay and cattle ranchers feel that the flyers are nothing but cloudbusters, robbing dryland farmers of rain...
...first Brandau and Kooser used silver iodide, sprayed through extensions on their planes' exhaust pipes. Eventually, to cut down expenses, they replaced the iodide with goop which seemed to work just as well. One man, flying high (up to 35,000 ft.) over the tops of thunderheads, seeds them with dry goop. Below the clouds, the other plane sprays a solution of superheated goop. Some ten minutes later, rain usually falls. Hail, so they claim, has no chance to form...
...State Representative Robert W. Root, whose constituents are in both camps, sponsored a bill requiring all weather-tampering experiments to be closely supervised by the state's department of agriculture. Result: Brandau and Kooser are still seeding thunderheads, but they have had to reveal their formula for goop. It is nothing but common table salt...
...literary satires and essays which he illustrated himself (Are You a Bromide?; Look Eleven Years Younger) and his word definitions (Burgess Unabridged). Some of his own coinages have become firmly fixed in the American language: blurb ("self-praise; to make a noise like a publisher"); bromide (trite saying); and goop (child with beastly manners). A few that never caught on: ivog ("food on the face; unconscious adornment of the person"); slub ("a mild indisposition which does not incapacitate"); quoob ("a person or thing obviously out of place...