Word: wham
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Schoolteacher John Miller and a neighbor were painting Miller's barn roof at his farm near Lucasville, Ohio. Wham! The neighbor was almost knocked off his aluminum ladder by an electric shock. In the town of Franklin Furnace, Farmer C.B. Ruggles' son was riding his pony when-whap!-he and the animal were jolted, apparently by electrical charges in the metallic parts of the bridle and stirrups. A housewife in Lucasville turned on the tap to do the dishes...
There are several fool-proof methods of determining precisely the arrival of spring in Cambridge. First, and foremost, is the celebrated Frisbee Factor, which, as all physics wonks know, is equal to the number of frisbees (genuine Wham-O's, no cheapie imitations allowed) that one spots floating in the Charles or caught in trees multiplied by the square root of b2 -- 2ac over 4a. If the number derived from this ridiculous, and practically useless formula is more than the number of swimming stories appearing in The Crimson during a one-week span, then spring has definitely arrived-accompanied, with...
...grunts spoke of slants and slopes, of Charley (Viet Cong) and Yards (Montagnard tribesmen) and White Mice (white-uniformed local police). Where they were was "the boonies of Nam"; everything else was "the world." Officials spoke windily of "winning hearts and minds," but the G.I.s shortened that to WHAM. To the airmen, the jungle was Indian Country, where you might end up either in the Hanoi Hilton (prison camp) or Buying the Farm (dead...
...Wham-O. Even if Frisbee eventually becomes a professional sport, as some observers fear, there is still likely to be more money in selling the disks than in flipping them. Twenty-four years ago, a Los Angeles building inspector named Fred Morrison invented the Frisbee after studying the airworthy pie pans used by the now defunct Frisbie bakery company of Bridgeport, Conn. In 1956 he sold the patent on an improved design to the Wham-O Co. (those wonderful people who brought you the Hula-Hoop), and since then the royalties have been sailing in: about $800,000 to date...
Griffiths' book is sharpest when he is dealing with subjects that lend themselves to the kind of heavy irony he practices-pacification, for example, WHAM (Winning the Hearts and Minds of the people, etc.), and Washington-based computerized evaluation of the ill-fated hamlet program. But Vietnam Inc. is more valuable when simply showing the pain and mess the war has caused. Because Griffiths, at his best, reinforces the sound historic conviction that this particular war could never have been won on terms useful to anyone, these sections have doubly tragic effect. They make the book...