Word: mailbag
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Well, we haven't dipped into the old mailbag for a long time now. Let's take a look at some of the more interesting items flooding into 14 Plympton...
...real life, they are twin sisters, Esther Pauline ("Eppie") Lederer (alias Ann Landers) and Pauline Esther ("Popo") Phillips (Abigail Van Buren), together the most widely syndicated columnists in the world, with upwards of 1,000 newspapers apiece. Says Loyola (Chicago) University Psychologist Eugene Kennedy: "Their columns are the national mailbag. The advice they give is fundamental common sense, and no one has ever improved on that...
...previous book on the decline of English, the bestselling Strictly Speaking, seemed to consist largely of dreadfully apt examples Newman had stuffed into a desk drawer over the years. These prompted readers to send him their own favorite examples. A Civil Tongue appears to be written from the mailbag. It offers a plethora of mangled speech and prose, drawn not only from advertisers, politicians, sportcasters and sociologists, but also from people who should know better, such as educators and journalists (among the most cited offenders: the New York Times, TIME* and Newman's employer...
...Museum of Science, the show is basic bring-the-kids. It has all the colorful optical illusions that I first encountered in the Tootsie Roll ads under "Metropolis Mailbag" in Superman comics: the same color seeming lighter or darker according to its background, a green, black and orange flag that makes you see red, white and blue when you look away. A prism breaks white light into the color spectrum, and a sodium vapor lamp turns everyone's skin yellow. There are lots of fun knobs to turn and fun buttons to push, and color TV excerpts from ZOOM...
...churches (with speakers and heaters for every car) and Jack-In-The-Box restaurants at which you merely pause, still in "drive," give your order to a polite machine, move ahead to a window, pick up your Bonusburger with the Secret Sauce as fast as a train snagging a mailbag, pay, then munch away even as you grind back up to 70 on the freeway...