Word: mclandress
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Take an IBM machine and feed in a gossip column. Then throw in a couple of back issues of the Congressional Record and several academic mortarboards. There you have The McLandress Dimension, a tongue-in-cheek commentary on contemporary American politics, academia, and society...
Mark Epernay's slim volume of essays is a paeon of praise to the imaginative and eccentric Herschel McLandress, former professor of Psychiatric Measurement at the Harvard Medical School, a genius fated, Mr. Epernay tells us, for a position of honor among the scientific and medical immortals. Not content to mend the tattered psyches of Harvard students and tired of serving as pathfinder to 'Cliffies trying to find themselves, Dr. McLandress devoted himself to applying statistical methods to the analysis of political and economic trends...
...greatest success, according to Mr. Epernay, a faithful Boswell, is the development of the McLandress Dimension, a measurement designed to record the length of time an individual can keep his thoughts centered on subjects other than himself. The unit of measurement is termed the McLandress Coefficient--known to the cognoscenti as the McL-C (pronounced Mack-el-see); a McL-C of 60 minutes, which is above average, means that the subject's thoughts return to himself approximately every hour...
...McLANDRESS DIMENSION, by Mark Epernay. A slyly satiric formula for estimating the character of statesmen and public personages by calculating their ability to concentrate on something other than themselves and ironic assaults on the dignity of bureaucracy. The pseudonymous author is ex-Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith...
...McLandress will probably be most widely remembered for his triumphant automation of U.S. foreign policy. Noting that the number of State Department employees had increased more than sixfold in two decades, he found a ready analogy in the case of the potato farmer who doubles and redoubles his labor force as harvesting conditions become more and more difficult. The "potato syllogism," in McLandress' homely phrase, argues that the ever-increasing complexity of U.S. foreign problems leads inevitably to a proliferation of policymakers, who proportionately take more and more time to reach agreement that the present policy is correct...