Word: ploy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...totally preposterous." Congress, he points out, can scarcely be expected to deal with "a mythical budget that doesn't exist. Now if the President really wants a $395 billion budget, he ought to send it up." Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey dismissed Ford's proposal as "a subtle ploy but not hard for people to figure out: give 'em a tax cut in January and hack the budget after the elections...
...prime to turn the Bronfman case into fiction. It was too badly bungled. Among the 65 thrillers she has written in a 55-year career are several classics: The ABC Murders is a fiendish triple trap, Murder in the Clouds, a sleek variant of the locked-room ploy set in the cabin of a small airplane, What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw, a neat bit of one-upmanship on Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair...
...Communist Party boss has also paid frequent lip service to democracy and emphasized a pragmatic reform program to bring all Portuguese "a better life." Although this moderate stance is probably only a ploy, Cunhal has been able to take much of the edge off his own reputation as a ruthless Stalinist. Even the least sympathetic officers have been impressed by the Communist Party's discipline, its effective organization and-perhaps above all-its loyal collaboration with the military. Only rarely does Cunhal drop his guard and publicly deride parliaments, elections and democratic freedoms...
Sadat's Ploy. After milking the melodramatic possibilities of the threat, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, only 30 hours before the old mandate expired, magnanimously accepted a "dawn appeal" by the U.N. Security Council to extend it for three more months (rather than six as suggested by Israel). Egyptian spokesmen insisted that Sadat's ploy had succeeded, since it had alerted the world to the dangerous potentialities of the Sinai situation. Some observers suspected that the President had made his threat in order to convince Egypt's more militant Arab allies that he can be tough...
Among sci-fi's most tired conventions is the one in which some latter-day cataclysm releases from an aeons-long sleep a monstrous prehistoric creature who rampages around for eight or nine reels until the combined brains of the military-scientific-industrial complex figure out a novel ploy to dispatch the thing...