Word: off-the-cuff
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...initial blast was the revelation that The Waste Land was originally titled He Do the Police in Different Voices. There is no clue to what Eliot meant by this unfortunate title. An off-the-cuff guess is that Eliot was alluding obscurely to cockney slang or to a vaudeville routine. Another speculation is that this was a working subtitle expressing Eliot's preoccupation with authority: one of the main theological theorems of The Waste Land is that God, who utters words like datta (give) and shantih (the peace that passes all understanding), speaks neither sense nor English but, like...
Nixon's running mate had apparently not got the word. At first, Spiro Agnew faulted the police for "overreacting." Then, in an intemperate off-the-cuff tirade before the Young Republicans in York, Pa., he did an about-face and said that the whole business, together with campus revolts, had been largely inspired by Communists and "fellow travelers." The Marylander confided that he had heard "through channels" that demonstrators in Chicago had inserted razor blades in their shoes to kick the cops. All that the "hippies and yippies" can do, he said, is "lay down in a park...
...general has doffed his bemedaled uniform for casual mufti in order to soften his military image, has abandoned droning prepared speeches for off-the-cuff talks and has even begun to enjoy the political stump. Recently, he articulately plugged Indonesia's "New Order" on a visit to the island of Sulawesi, where he wowed the natives not only by giving pithy explanations of what his government is trying to do but by donning a sarong and the peaked local headdress. Later this month, he goes off to Bali on a similar speechmaking tour...
...enact his tax bill and cut expenditures. "I know it is not a popular thing for a President to do-to ask anyone for a penny out of a dollar to pay for a war that is not popular," Johnson told savings-and-loan officials in an off-the-cuff talk. "If I were concerned only with my own popularity or my own poll, that wouldn't be the way I would go about it-to suggest higher taxes or more wars. But you have to do what is responsible, and you have to do what is right...
...history may have lapsed, but his sense of political timing was unusually keen. His drive for the G.O.P. presidential nomination had received little attention during the summer until the Detroit riots and his differences with the President put him back in the headlines. Last week's off-the-cuff remarks landed on television screens and front pages across the nation. He followed up with a speech urging U.S. flexibility toward China, in the hope that Peking will reach the point where it will "deserve and desire" United Nations membership...