Word: snake-oil
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...choose such a partisan nutritionist as Dr. Winick to cover the International Health Fair [Oct. 23]. Though he renders a service in exposing the faddism and snake-oil huckstering in the movement, he overlooks what will be its lasting effect: turning Americans away from the plastic "long shelf life" foods of the supermarkets back to the plain, flavorsome-and more healthful-foods of the real world...
...them. He satirized fustian while indulging in it. His senatorial solemnity was a species of burlesque. He belonged in a Chautauqua rather than a McLuhan age, although he became a master of television performing. His manner, leavened by an exquisite sense of self-parody, conjured up Americana, suggestions of snake-oil peddlers, backwoods Shakespeareans, the gentle rapscallionry of Penrod Schofield's or Pudd'nhead Wilson's world. Before he died of a pulmonary embolism at 73, Everett McKinley Dirksen had himself become a unique object of Americana...
...fierce joys and harsh sorrows against the spare Greek landscape. Anthony Quinn was possessed by the title role; Herschel Bernardi merely inhabits the part like a rented room. Quinn had the sexual assurance of a goat; Bernardi talks up lust as if he were a barker for a snake-oil remedy. Zorba has to be-as Quinn was and Bernardi is not-a grizzled Dionysian pagan, a piece of the Hellenic sun shaped like...
...brand new painkiller, says France's Dr. Henri Laborit, dampens the aches and pains of arthritis, burns, cancer, childbirth, neuralgia, rheumatism-just about all the ills the flesh is heir to. Such fantastic claims may sound like the spiel of a turn-of-the-century snake-oil peddler, but the medical community has learned to take Dr. Laborit at his word. When he reports on the properties of the compound which he calls Ag 246, he speaks with the authority of a researcher who has already been credited with important drug discoveries...
...served as house comic in a burlesque hall, gave a snake-oil spiel for a stunt-driving show, and worked the circuit as a comic diver-but when he was ordered to plunge 90 ft. into a 7-ft. tub of water, he quit, saying "Look. I'm getting $16 a week, and that won't even pay for the iodine." His first big-time comedian's job came at Manhattan's Club 18. a downstairs bin where everybody on the staff took part in the act. even the waiters and chef. One day Hollywood...