Word: spiel
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...Truth or Consequences last week brought this hoary Greek joke up to date with a sequence about a vacuum-cleaner salesman who innocently calls on a housewife, is interrupted in mid-spiel by the arrival of the husband, and almost instantly finds himself in the center of a family quarrel. The irate husband throws his wife onto a sofa, then knocks her down against a table; she retaliates by belting him with a vase and breaking a chair over his head. While the salesman, cowering over his vacuum-cleaner attachments, quavers: "You shouldn't do that!" husband and wife...
...Peace Race" bicycle riders would pump into view. Any lap of the 1,330-mile grind from Warsaw to Berlin to Prague, Iron Curtain counterpart of the West's lung-busting Tour de France, was guaranteed to be twice as funny as the loudest politician's patriotic spiel...
...scale direct mail promotions, Jersey City Broker Walter F. Tellier plugged his penny uranium stocks as "a ground-floor opportunity," "the best buy in 20 years." "You can't lose-you're investing in a sure thing," his high-pressure salesmen promised investors. With this glib spiel, Tellier, one of the biggest over-the-counter dealers in the U.S., since 1951 lured in 50,000 buyers of shares in Utah's Consolidated Uranium Mines Inc. He said that Consolidated had 85,000 acres of uranium land leases and had discovered $1,000,000 worth of uranium...
Lampooning the Vulgar. Powers' talent reaches also outside the rectory. In Blue Island a young suburban housewife's get-acquainted coffee pour turns into a cruel social fiasco when an older woman who has posed as a friend suddenly does a commercial spiel on furniture polish in mid-party, and later presses a collapsible mop on the sobbing hostess as a payoff for the captive customers...
...Ashforth sounded a little more like a barker making a midway spiel than a banker making a year-end report, he had good reason. Any Canadian taking stock of the nation's economy at the close of 1955 was bound to be buoyant. The year had begun with some 500,000 unemployed, and with spreading fears that Canada's postwar boom might be collapsing. Not only did such fears turn out to be unfounded, but 1955 turned out to be the best year Canada ever had. In Ottawa last week, the chief watchman of the country...