Word: potter
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Friends and admirers of British Humorist Stephen Potter, who died in London last week at 69, will recognize Lifeman's rejoinder as the Canterbury Block, a devastating all-purpose ploy. "Yes, but not in the South," as Potter went on to explain in Some Notes on Lifemanship, is a phrase that "with slight adjustments, will do for any argument about any place, if not about any person. It is an impossible comment to answer." Lifemanship can take many other directions. One gifted practitioner, cited by Potter in the same volume, dedicated his book "TO PHYLLIS, in the hope that...
Annoying Ploy. British humor can be highly perishable, and its point is often so obscure as to defy detection -except perhaps, by the British themselves. But Stephen Potter's wry and understated advice on how to win games, including the game of life, with losing hands endeared him to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Any of his satirical books, from the first (Gamesmanship, or The Art of Winning Games
Without Actually Cheating) to the last (Golfmanship), can easily be absorbed at one sitting. In any of them, it is impossible to miss Potter's point: that anyone can triumph over all the pompous types who hog the center of the stage -the long-winded bore, the authority, the physician, the superior competitor. How? By using stratagems of such seeming innocence and such Machiavellian obliqueness that the victim scarcely knows he has been pinked. Thus one day, playing golf with a friend, Potter asked "a bit of a favor" on the third hole. But he delayed revealing what...
...intensely annoying ploy often used by doctors," Potter wrote, "is to treat Patient as if he were as ignorant of all anatomical knowledge as a child of four." He will, for example, "refer to the blood corpuscles as 'the white fellows and the red chaps,' " and will inquire of a constipated lady patient: "How are the bow-wows this morning?" An effective way to reduce such nonsense before it starts, Potter advised, is to cast doubt on the doctor's professionalism: "I am, I suppose, right in calling you Doctor...
Died. Stephen Potter, 69, the greatest contemporary gamesman of them all (see MODERN LIVING...