Word: guff
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
HELP WANTED: Savvy, hard-nosed strategist desperately needed to jump-start stalled campaign. Experience in overcoming innate caution of button-down Greek candidate a must. Prior misdemeanors no problem. For the right stuff, we will take public guff. Contact Dukakis campaign...
This is the sort of guff one can hear on The Morton Downey Jr. Show, yet it is one of the perverse pleasures of reading Fussell that he can play the loudmouth and the egghead with equal relish. One of his models is George Orwell, who hid his social pedigree and erudition behind a blunt style that shook comfortable perceptions with irony and contradictions. When Fussell goes to the races at the Indianapolis Speedway, for example, he begins with the standard derisive sociology about the "middles" in the reserved seats and the black-leather set that gathers in the muddy...
...only has Bush recruited a top-flight campaign staff, but he also has, as he put it in an interview last week, "learned that you don't get bogged down in a lot of details or run the campaign yourself." Bush's new take-no-guff political persona is, of course, one of the major surprises of the campaign. Bush's stiff but improving podium personality can be viewed as an ability to learn from earlier mistakes and to patiently absorb the coaching of others...
...ideological baggage that the pockets of a trench coat could handle, namely the message that espionage is a dirty business whose dirt is fairly evenly distributed on both sides. Forsyth was darkly entertaining in The Day of the Jackal, but his new book is tract writing, and its tendentious guff leaves the reader where he started, unwilling to believe and unable to escape. -By John Skow
Heller warned, however, of several "thunderheads" that could rain on Reagan's re-election effort or generate hailstorms for whoever occupies the White House in 1985. The dangers include rising interest rates, a gargantuan federal deficit, a plunge in the dollar's value, a cutoff of Persian Guff oil supplies, and increasing turmoil in the financial industry as a result of the near collapse of the Continental Illinois Bank and the continuing troubles that major banks are having with loans to Latin American countries...