Word: payoff
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...anti-takeover sentiment. That mood may have helped persuade Revlon Group Chairman Ronald Perelman to give up his hostile $4.1 billion offer to buy Gillette, the razor-blade maker. Probably more important, though, was the ! fast $34 million that Revlon earned by promising to back off. Investors branded the payoff as a clear case of greenmail, since Gillette agreed to buy back Perelman's 13.9% stake in the company at a premium price that was unavailable to other shareholders...
...another. But to connive at arms sales to Iran, for whatever reason, seems clearly to have been a blunder that undermined U.S. credibility. It is hard to understand how the U.S. could have gained anything by strengthening Iran militarily. To permit arms sales that even appeared to be a payoff for the release of hostages was even worse, since seeming to reward terrorists is dangerous indeed. And by failing to foresee that its maneuvers could not be kept secret, and then being so plainly stuck for any effective way to explain those maneuvers publicly, the Administration has called into question...
...what're you doin'?" Jack (John Lurie), a pimp, asks one of his girls sitting outside in the New Orleans dusk. "Just watchin' the light change," she exhales. But watchin' the light change is the big payoff in a Jim Jarmusch movie. Stranger Than Paradise, a cult hit of 1984, cased its lowlifes with the metallic impassiveness of a closed-circuit monitor in a 7-Eleven store. You could find the proceedings funny or tedious; Jarmusch was too hip to care. He does have an eye, though, and aided by Cinematographer Robby Muller he makes Down by Law a ravishing...
...Harvard for its emphasis on esoteric research. "M.I.T.," Gray says, "is more at ease with the real world." To which Paul Martin, dean of Harvard's Division of Applied Sciences, replies with a seigneurish thrust: "The kind of research done here is not on the one-to-three-year payoff plan. We can't rely on places like M.I.T. to represent this part of civilization...
...payoff is well worth the trouble. The divers have retrieved more than $15 million in silver coins, gold dust, and artifacts; the Whydah's bell alone has been appraised at $5 million. Clifford, who has meticulously studied the manifests and other records of the 50-odd ships plundered by the Whydah's captain before his ship sank, estimates that the loot still in the sand is worth $380 million more. It includes 500,000 to 750,000 silver coins, 10,000 lbs. of gold dust, a casket of "hen's-egg-size East Indian jewels" and some African ivory...