Word: pyorrhea
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even this grisly story is lightened by comic touches. Charley's family gathers gloomily around the radio and hears Gabriel Heatter, the doom-laden commentator, warn "of dreaded pyorrhea." On another occasion, Charley, in adolescent bravado, adds "the suicide caper to his repertoire of small talk, using it to fascinate women." Alas, it only bores them. As a companion piece to Factory, the story sharply emphasizes Sheed's overall theme: the harmful consequences of clutching at visions of the past, whether they are mythical but life-sustaining visions like Jimmy's or real but death-dealing ones...
...irreverent study of the numbers game called How to Lie with Statistics, Author Darrell Huff coined the word "statisticulation"-the art of lying with statistics while seeming objective. One trade that statisticulates regularly is advertising. A nostrum for piles or pyorrhea is endorsed by eight cut of ten physicians because the ad agency has tirelessly spent time and money assembling panel after panel until it finds one that shows an eight-out-of-ten result...