Word: joking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Suggestion boxes were once considered a joke, and some employees still treat them that way. Most managers now take them quite seriously, have lately started to solicit suggestions from engineers and supervisors as well as clerks and production workers. Companies accept some 30% of the suggestions, save an estimated $200 million a year from the ideas they take out of the box. Says Douglas Aircraft President Donald W. Douglas Jr.: "These ideas help us improve our competitive position through reduced costs." Ford is so eager for ideas that employees who win the maximum $6,000 award also receive...
...embarrassment, has had to reckon with since. Thayer's Beethoven is a man of atrocious manners, immense ego and ungovernable temper who at one time or another turned on virtually every one of his friends and alienated most of the musicians of Vienna. His idea of a joke was to dump a bowl of gravy on a waiter who had brought him the wrong dish...
...throw their skirts in the air while the orchestra saws out some Offenbach, and they kick up their legs in what can be precisely described as the can't-can't. Georges Ulmer, the man who wrote the ballad Pigalle and who acts as M.C., tells a joke: "The Folies-Bergère is an old institution, nearly 100 years old. Of course, lately we have changed some of the girls." He does not say which ones, and without radioactive carbon it is absolutely impossible to tell...
Hubley regards commercial success with a suspicion born of the knowledge of its dangers for his art. He saw mass production turn the Disney studio into a factory. He watched success transform his McGoo from a Babbitt into a sadist-joke. And worst of all, as supervisor of animation at UPA and then director of Storyboard Productions, his own company, he has felt the expansionist pressures of a commercial world forcing him into administrative positions, removing him from the creative work he loves...
...nail a violator of these laws requires proof of willfulness. And those who cry "Jump!" might try to plead that it was all a joke. "But this is a serious business," warns a top New York prosecutor, "and the laws are tehre to be used...