Word: worthlessness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Checkmate. In Detroit, Vernon Dobson bought a car with a worthless check, sold it at a profit to cover the check with cash, discovered that he had been given a bum check himself...
...taken lessons from some Renaissance master. But his subjects are a modern nightmare. His women, like modern Madonnas, mourn, eyes shut against the world. A disfigured war hero stares numbly out of his canvas, his blind eye patched with paper money, his chest covered with worthless medals of tin, cork, broken combs, and tiny crutches. Poleo's trees are dead, his earth pocked and parched, his cities mere ruins and rubble. In some paintings, there are no signs of life at all-only tiny ladders down which the human race has fled to escape an atomic...
...bank, the D.A. charged, had known that Benjamin was a swindler. After he got his Title Guarantee loan, said the D.A., the bank had discovered that his collateral (invoices and bills of lading) was worthless. Instead of making this information public, the bank covered up for Benjamin. When other banks asked about his credit standing, Title Guarantee answered that Benjamin "knows the business very well," and that his "account has been very satisfactory." Result: Benjamin was able to borrow $320,000 more at other lenders' windows. He used part of it to pay off Title Guarantee, said he lost...
...reason the test is worthless : unlike Humpty Dumpty who shouted right in his friend's ear (see cut), testers instinctively lower their voices when they approach a subject. Other reasons: testers' voices vary; other sounds in usual testing rooms make a big difference but are ignored in figuring a man's hearing; because of the way the human ear works, the tester's voice does not sound significantly louder until he is within ten feet...
When his literary agent icily described his novel as "worthless," Carnegie's "heart almost stopped." But, plucking up his courage, he decided to 'borrow the ideas of a lot of other writers" and make them into "the best book on public speaking . . . ever . . . written." This book flopped, too, and Carnegie decided that instead of borrowing from, or acting like others, "you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life." Out of the depths of his heart and personal experience, he drew How to Win Friends and Influence People. Today, wiry, white-maned Dale Carnegie...