Word: wisecrack
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...leading Senators are still miffed that no one in the White House bothered to show them the treaties before the signing ceremony last month. A widely quoted wisecrack by Carter's aide Hamilton Jordan last week scarcely improved those bruised White House-Hill relations. Referring to the cascade of anti-treaty letters that Senators have been receiving, Jordan snickered that "some of those bastards don't have the spine not to vote their mail. If you change their mail, you change their mind." Said New Jersey Republican Clifford Case, a supporter of the pacts: "That was not helpful...
DIED. Julius Henry ("Groucho") Marx, 86, doyen of American comedy; of pneumonia; in Los Angeles. A wizard of wisecracks and a prince of puns, Groucho began his nearly seven-decade-long career in vaudeville with his zany brothers Harpo, Chico, Gummo and Zeppo. They reached the pinnacle of Broadway in the mid-1920s and went on to hilarious movies, such as Horse Feathers (1932) and A Night at the Opera (1935), that still enjoy a huge cult following and invariably feature Groucho as an appealing rogue capable of fast-talking his way out of any difficulty. On his radio...
Cloud Seeding. In Vienna, Ga., home town of President Carter's press secretary Jody Powell, Dooly County Farm Agent Mack Sloan manages a weak wisecrack: "If it don't rain here soon, a lot of people will go under and have to go into selling roadside peanuts to Plains tourists." Farmers in every county, including Tom Chandler, Billy Carter's partner in several peanut deals, are collecting one dollar for every acre of peanut land so they can hire an airplane for a month's cloud seeding at a total cost of $75,000. Last week...
...author writes almost too unerringly clever dialogue. Everything is buried under the ubiquitous wisecrack-the ironic putdowns and self-putdowns by which Americans play tag with their terror of failure. For failure is finally what Ordinary People is about. It may be Guest's ultimate irony that the older brother's drowning and Conrad's attempted suicide are only symbols for spiritual death-for a thousand subtle methods of neglect and undernourishment by means of which loved ones kill and are killed within the family circle...
When Administration health officials begin lining up Americans for their flu shots next fall, joked Democratic Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington, "they might have 'em vote at the same time." Magnuson's wisecrack, made during hearings on President Ford's emergency request for $135 million to inoculate all Americans against a possible outbreak of swine influenza (TIME, April 5), was tacit recognition of the emerging controversy surrounding the proposal. Despite final congressional approval and the signing of the measure into law last week, some legislators and doctors are wondering out loud whether the flu program is merely...