Word: wigwag
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Britain's immaculate Tailor and Cutter Magazine surveyed the international scene, issued a list of the world's best-dressed males. Among them: Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito ("the ritziest looking dictator in the world"), Richard Nixon ("a neat line between the wigwag shapes of U.S. drape and the ludicrously tight togs of U.S. Ivy Leaguers"), durable Hoofer Fred Astaire ("one of the few Americans who can wear a suit of tails"), Cinemactor Rex Harrison ("the best British answer to the Italian look"), Douglas Fairbanks Jr. ("British taste and American imagination"), Plutocrat Nubar Gulbenkian...
Continental, said Estes Kefauver, is "Public Enemy No. i." It has a monopoly on the transmission of minute-by-minute information from local race tracks to bookies throughout the country. Through distributors which the committee branded dummies, it gets its news by wigwag or telephone from the tracks, flashes it by Western Union teletype throughout the country. It supplies last-minute news on track conditions, horses scratched, changes in jockeys, last-minute odds at the parimutuel windows. Big-time bookies must have it to lay off bets when a "hot" horse gets a dangerously high play, to get the results...
...Wilson had previously made such an offer with the proviso that the man give the job his full time, but Labor had turned a cold shoulder. A labor spokesman said in effect that Wilson was a liar, no such offer had been made "by personal conversation, mail, telephone, telegram, wigwag or smoke signal...
Give pop music fans a song they can wigwag, boom or clomp to (e.g., Down by the Old Mill Stream, Deep in the Heart of Texas'), and a national contagion is started. Last week RCA Victor had a husky little new number in the boom division called The Thing. It had sold 400,000 copies in ten days, an alltime Victor high, and was spreading like German measles...
...every kind of wigwag and smoke signal in the language of diplomacy, the Administration seemed to be trying last week to tell Chinese Communist Boss Mao Tse-tung that he had nothing to worry about from the U.S. The policymakers were convinced that the U.N. forces would win in Korea if Chinese or Russian Communists didn't butt in, and apparently they hoped that a little cajoling might keep them out. Whatever their reasoning, their pronouncements sounded like an attempt at appeasement...