Word: gumming
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Upon launching his campaign, President Obama stopped smoking. Quite publicly. Letting the world see him chew gum and fidget with his pencils was an invaluable example. I have now practiced long enough to have seen scores of people, more than a few of whom I've loved, get miserably sick and die from tobacco use. I've pointed to the black spot on their X-ray and watched strong men and women collapse, touched the smoke-grown tumors in the operating room, the path lab, even on those poor experimental bunnies' ears and I'm convinced. You can be dubious...
...while sales may have slumped, the spirit of some of Russia's rich remains breezy. The élite GUM shopping mall, situated on Red Square, has seen its number of shoppers fall some 30% this year, according to Ageyeva, the buyer. But Lilya Bondarchuk, a manager at the Jil Sander store in GUM, says that "clients joke about the crisis and ask each other if they have noticed it yet." Natalya Batalova, a corporate attorney who shops at GUM every few months, says she hasn't felt the crisis so far. "I don't know what it is," she says...
...arrival of a new President tossed some tinder onto the cold coals of economic confidence; now Orszag and others inside the Administration are trying to feed the fire. And in spite of Obama's insistence that his team must walk and chew gum at the same time - make that "run and chew gum," his advisers recently amended - it is starting to register that nothing would stoke the flames better than a credible strategy for cleaning up the banks. As a senior Administration official puts it, "The money is less important than restoring a sense of confidence." (See pictures...
...second point is that a lasered-in President is an antidote to the flightiness and indiscipline endemic to both Washington and Wall Street. Fixing one problem at a time may strike Obama as mere gum-chewing. But in modern-day Washington, one is a very high number. The reason so many people were left slack-jawed by the Obama budget was not that they disagreed with his premise that health-care costs are out of control or that energy independence is desirable or that better schools are important to the future of the economy. It was the real-world knowledge...
Back in our high school days, FlyBy remembers that the cool kids used to use nicotine patches and gum just for the slight buzz. It was a lot more discreet than smoking, but it might as well have been a tattoo that said "I think I'm a badass!" Prediction: As people take advantage of free and easy access to nicotine, it won’t be long before “patches” supplant laundry room quarters as the currency of roommate transactions...