Word: hucksterism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Egostatism. There never has been any doubt that Kirk is among the quick. But is he for real? Says a former business associate: "He is a complete political huckster, a phony and a very dangerous man." To Bill Baggs, editor of the Miami News, "Kirk appears to be the only man in Western civilization who has more answers than there are questions." The Miami Herald refers to him as "Claudius Maximus...
...show was well salted with hilarious vignettes of the beauty world. A beauty-counter huckster romanced his customers ("You would be the perfect type for Ultima"), a mincing makeup man proclaimed, "You now look as if you worshiped at the shrine of Aphrodite." One cosmetics-department manager confided: "If a product sold for 15?-a face cream-we could not give it away, we couldn't sell it for 15?. At $1, there'd be a certain group of customers; at $3, an even wider number of customers-certainly more than at 15?." Why? Summed up a psychoanalyst...
...sensitive, cigarette huckster son of a despotic Greek rug dealer find happiness with the sleep-around daughter of a small-town Dixie bigot? Well, sort of. If you give him 444 pages to work...
When Steve left a year later, it was the end of his formal education. He shipped out on an oil tanker, worked in lumber camps, did a tour in the Marine Corps, worked as a sandalmaker, a delivery boy and as a carny huckster. "We were selling these ballpoint pens," he says, "and man, they were worth like 160 apiece. And we were sellin' them for a buck. It was a full scam...
False Sentimentality. To use a phrase from current teenage slang, Algren has gone ape, real ape. The pity of all this is that the wheedling, folksy tone of the huckster ("I've learned a few tricks of the trade myself, such as adding an 's' when you want to show there is more than one of something") comes from the mouth of a man who once had a real gold watch to sell and not a brass turnip...