Word: shrewd
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Saint of Common Sense. Franklin's character-quirky, shrewd, humorous-shows in every line of verse, in his dry homilies, and even in his most perfunctory business correspondence. The "saint of common sense" never falls from this mundane kind of sanctity. In his early middle age he is sometimes the virtuous and successful artisan-turned-entrepreneur, who could offer the sound advice of one who had walked into Philadelphia with a few coppers, three loaves and a knowledge of how to set up type as his sole capital. "Time is money," he wrote in Poor Richard...
...from the Vatican to make three papal soutanes, one for a large man, one medium, one small. When the cardinals were locked in conclave to elect a new Pope, the outfits were locked up with them. "It is difficult to cut without anyone specific in mind," says Gammarelli. A shrewd papal handicapper, he felt that in case of a deadlock the compromise candidate might be an old customer of his, Venice's Cardinal Roncalli, and cut the garments for the large man with him in mind. Bonaventura's hunch was right: when Pope John XXIII appeared...
...Century-Fox). "Higamous hogamous! Woman's monogamous. Hogamous higamous! Man is polygamous." This questionable proposition, the theme of almost every sniggery story since Eve caught Adam fooling around with Lilith, served as a sort of epigraph to an anthology of off-color jokes composed in 1957 by a shrewd young man named Leslie Stevens and palmed off on the Broadway public as a play. Partly because the jokes were slickly written, mostly because they were deftly read by two famous charm merchants (Charles Boyer, Claudette Colbert) and a well-stacked skyscraper (Julie Newmar), the play was a mash...
...Pierce, its 1941 merger with Fenner & Beane, and in 1958 finally got his own name on the door of the world's largest international investment house as the directing partner, becoming board chairman a year later; of Parkinson's disease; in Litchfield, Conn. Modest but shrewd, Smith brought Main Street to Wall Street by directing a massive advertising drive aimed at turning middle-income families into a mass mar ket for securities, boosted Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith's customers to 450,000 and its gross annual income to more than $136 million. To Wall Streeters painfully...
...Keller is too intelligent and too shrewd to delude himself by his enthusiasms, and at times his doubts can echo like mocking prophecies: "I had already forgotten the teaching of history, that great majorities can be poisoned and ruined by a single person and in gratitude will in their turn poison and ruin honest people - that a majority which has once been lied to can go on wanting to be lied to, and raises ever new liars on its shield, as if it were only one single conscious and resolute scoundrel...