Word: quipping
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...looks rangy and hale, an ageless cowboy. On a podium with waving flags and floating balloons, he can mesmerize and uplift. But when he speaks extemporaneously, the effect can be more halting than inspirational. He has long been notorious for bungling facts. He often mangles syntax. Somehow, with a quip or a smile, he usually manages to fight free of his verbal tangles, leaving listeners only uneasy, not alarmed...
...ruefully describes them as "the best public relations team ever to enter the White House." They got away with cutting presidential press conferences to the fewest in ten years, knowing these can expose Reagan's ignorances. They get their man on nightly television with a planned quip and a farewell wave, while the helicopter's rotors drown out questions. White House advisers anonymously brief network correspondents, promoting Reagan's policies and taking potshots at his critics...
...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...