Word: psyching
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...every word or act into its opposite, is now a universal cliche. The game of spotting Freudian slips and symbols, once chic and daring, has filtered down from the cocktail party to the corner bar. Anyone who can read seems qualified to bat around complexes, compulsions and obsessions. Pop-psych is all over the place...
...psych is the commuter carefully tallying his "compatibility quotient" in a newspaper quiz ("Do you resist asking directions in a strange town?"). It is the applicant for a new job checking True or False on a personality test ("I have strange and peculiar thoughts." "I have never seen a vision"). Pop-psych is found in heavy-breathing advice to the lovelorn, warning girls to beware of their father fixations. It is in the domestic-advice columns telling the anxious mothers of bed-wetters that the children are resenting their "free-flowing" permissiveness. The "psychosomatic" cold and eating to "compensate" have...
...have a strategy for the Heps; I've thought a lot about it and I know it's right. The only thing now is that I hope I don't think about my Heptagonals' strategy so much that I psych myself...
...Scoffer thinks of exams and papers as jousts between himself and the grader. He tries to please the grader, to "psych him out," to catch his fancy with a gimmick. A typical Scofer ploy is to make a highly improbable comparison: "What Charles Dickens has in common with Channel...
Prof. Voltaire. At the University of Michigan, fraternity houses are stocked with not only old exams but also "teacher psych-outs"-dossiers compiled by A-students on professors' likes and dislikes. This allows con men to lug around the profs favorite magazine, or to ape his lingo. If this fails, says a recent Michigan graduate, there is the "welfare approach" of pretending poverty by wearing "hand-pressed khaki pants" and asking the professor on the very first-day "Ah, how much did you say that textbook was?" As a Wisconsin con man puts it: "These days...