Word: pencil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...trade jargon-who do their most important work at lunch. There the menu and the contract may get a more careful reading than the manuscript. Then there are the creative editors, who see their task as the finding and overall shaping of a manuscript. Finally, there are the pencil editors, who work line by line on messy or complex manuscripts (although that chore is often left to copyreaders...
With sales slow, interest rates high and money tight, businessmen are looking for any creative way to make their bottom lines look better. One sharp-pencil technique is euphemistically called "prudent cash management." But to its victims this is the old game of "Your check is in the mail." Says John Gordana, president of Equitable Adjustment Service, Inc., in New Jersey: "Normally responsible executives with good credit records are conjuring up ingenious techniques to stall or avoid bill payments...
They assemble in the second floor conference room of the Freshman Dean's Office--that red house on Prescott St.--and begin to slog through the thousands of documents. They take batches of 25, and armed with a notepad, pencil and lots of coffee, scribble notes on nearly every incoming freshman. First they divide the rooming applications into two piles--smokers and non-smokers--which is often the only rooming preference students have. They then divide the piles again according to the room size each student requested (single, double, triple, etc.). The reading process take about three and a half...
...Balls, witty oxymorons (Peachum describes himself as a "self-pitying stoic") and perversely amusing ironies (a house burns down because of faulty wiring in a smoke detector). There are also the author's ticklish ways with the jargon of three generations, throwaway lines ("A writer is Like his pencil. He must be worn down to be kept sharp"), and a dandy piece of burlesque when Peachum tries to undress Officer d'Amboise in her patrol car ("Deploying my right hand slowly downward along her waist, I tried to unzip her trousers, but first had to contend with...
Also being tested in national park rest rooms is a new gravel-impregnated wall paint, designed to break a lipstick, crayon or pencil at the first stroke. But such anti-lipstick measures are useless against the girls who like to add their smears to ancient Indian carvings in rock so porous that the lipstick sinks in and becomes indelible...