Word: sleight
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Through it all, Sam spiegeled-a verb which has a special meaning for anyone who has worked for him. It means to soothe, cajole, or con another; a talking-out-of, a sleight-of-mouth operation. During the six months the Lawrence crew spent in the desert, many a worker cracked, more from Sam-than sun-strain. A typical mutineer's speech: "I'm through. I've had it. I quit. I'm going to tell Sam he can take his bleeding, bloody picture and shove it. I'm getting out of here...
...Sleight of Hand. California's Democratic Governor Pat Brown finds his budget $150 million short this year, plans to make most of it up by advancing the due dates for corporate and personal income taxes and by dipping into oil-royalty reserves. That would still leave him short next year, so he has proposed putting income tax collection on a withholding basis-another sleight-of-hand procedure that would yield a one-time windfall in shifting to pay-as-you-go. Part of Brown's budget planning is based on the doubly doubtful proposition that Kennedy...
...Johnson, like a sleight-of-hand artist who asks a member of the audience to check his top hat for rabbits, skillfully engages the reader in his literary experiments. Sometimes he talks to him directly about the problems of writing. Achim begins this way: "So I thought I'd start out with a simple sentence, gravely, something like: she telephoned him, period, then I'd add: across the border, casually, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, as a surprise, to make you think you understand." Sometimes he studs his text with disarming headlines...
Among the chicks and chuckles, Reggie Van Gleason presents a magic show, and rings in Prestidigitator Milbourne Christopher to give a helping sleight of hand...
Accidental Justice. Two characters are among the best grotesques in Greene's entire waxworks. Conder is the archetype of the author's army of squalid journalists -a wretch so practiced at sleazy sleight-of-mind that, although he is a bachelor, he tells everyone that he has a wife and six sickly children. The other is the unnamed Assistant Commissioner, an old jungle hand stiff with integrity and old wounds and hated by his underlings at Scotland Yard. He is a magnificent Greene hero who pursues criminals with stolid skill, shutting away the unhappy knowledge that his quarries...