Word: pan
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Concluded Gould: "Ratings have come to fulfill the sinister function of being the absolute critical standard for radio programing. It is as though a Rembrandt, a Beethoven symphony, a burlesque comic, a Tin Pan Alley ballad, a Keats sonnet and a pulp-magazine serial all were to be weighed on the same scales. That would seem too much even for radio...
...misuse the expression "tinker's dam" by spelling it "tinker's damn" [TIME, Jan. 7]? ... The latter expression means nothing. A tinker's dam was really a dam made of clay, which the traveling tinkers used to surround a spot on a pan or kettle to keep the solder from spreading or running until it cooled, while [the utensil was] being repaired. As soon as the solder cooled, the dam was thrown away as useless and worthless. Hence . . . "tinker's dam" to denote something having no value...
...make the public laugh-Danny Kaye, Groucho Marx, Fred Allen, Jack Benny-split their sides laughing when Abe performs. Outside a little circle of Hollywood and Manhattan partygoers, few know the 35-year-old, balding, blinking radio writer whose hobby is poking fun at Tin Pan Alley. But last week, Abe agreed that his stuff was too good to keep. He began a $3,000-a-week job writing a new CBS comedy show (Holiday & Co.) on which he will air some of his songs. He has also teamed up with Publisher Bennett (Try and Stop Me) Cerf...
...which F.P.A. glumly observed that "the only people who like to write [are] the people who write terribly." Scanning his first week's effort, some readers wondered if he was beginning to like his work. F.P.A. is unworried: if the three-month syndicate trial doesn't pan out, he still makes pool-table pin money on radio's Information Please (around $500 a week...
...implications of this discovery are great, Leet emphasized. It will prove useful in modern mineral prospecting by the painless method of remote control, a vast improvement over the "pick, pan, and pray" system employed during the Yukon and 1849 gold rushes...