Word: quip
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...have been trying to increase efficiency and productivity by replacing blue-collar workers with steel-collar ones-robots. Over the past three years, the Big Three automakers have installed 3,000 robots to handle welding, painting and other tasks previously done by U.A.W. members. As company executives like to quip, those new workers never take coffee breaks and always show up for work on Monday...
Until the deadlock is broken, every utterance by Moscow and Washington will be freighted with significance. The Reagan bombing quip, repeated and amplified by the East bloc's controlled press, has poisoned the already contentious atmosphere. "Nobody should ever joke like that, even in his thoughts or dreams," said a Polish retiree. Said a Moscow student: "If it's true, it means Reagan hates all of us, not just our politicians." An elderly Soviet housewife angrily noted that "such words could only come from a person who has never lived through an air raid." But a Hungarian electrician...
...Service was in Santa Barbara with much of the rest of the White House press corps when word began to circulate that President Reagan had joked about bombing the Soviet Union while testing his microphone for a radio speech. Two TV networks, CBS and Cable News Network, had the quip on tape but felt obliged not to air it because of a longstanding agreement with other broadcasters that Reagan's warmup sessions were off the record. As a print reporter, however, Devroy was under no such constraint. After hunting down what Reagan had said, she consulted with her editors...
...with the 16th century geological musings of Martin Luther: "Longer ago than 6,000 years the world did not exist." It hurtles downhill from there toward outright insolence. Did Abraham Lincoln really say in 1859, "Negro equality! Fudge! How long . . . shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to quip, so low a piece of demagogism as this"? Did the U.S. Labor Department truly announce that 1930 would be "a splendid employment year...
Among the thousands of nasty quips and barbed conceits that James Abbott McNeill Whistler sped at the world, the only one that everyone knows is perhaps apocryphal. Oscar Wilde, in admiration of some Whistlerian mot: "Jimmy, I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar, you will." In all his long career Whistler produced only one painting that enjoyed the same permanent celebrity as this riposte, and it, of course, is Arrangement in Gray and Black, No. 1: Portrait of the Painter's Mother, 1872, one of the half-dozen most famous pictures of the 19th century...