Word: padding
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Kennedy's front-line political weapon is his own power of political persuasion. He courts Congressmen, inviting them to the White House for intimate social gatherings, calling them on the telephone to hash over old times on the Hill, remembering their birthdays with personal notes, carrying a tiny pad on which to jot down their political problems...
...more than a sentence, and seldom does it exceed two. When successful, it is a marvel of compression, laced with wisdom or wit. "The paragraph is an uncompromising medium," says Vaughan. "In 25 or 30 words you have to say something wise or funny, with no chance to pad it out or conceal the lack of point. Also, the paragraph presupposes some information on the part of the reader. The paragrapher can't explain what he's talking about or he has drowned his effect." Paragrapher Vaughan does not often drown his effect. Samples...
Guitar atwangle, eyes aimed into a far corner, the voice pitched in a keening wail, the singer holds the rapt attention of the shaggy boys, girls and dogs scattered around his Greenwich Village pad. In a campus dormitory in Ohio, in a café alonng San Francisco's North Beach, in a living room in upper-class Grosse Pointe, Mich., other singers with guitars chant tales of tragic love. In fact, all over the U.S., people of all descriptions-young and middleaged, students, doctors, lawyers, farmers, cops-are plucking guitars and moaning folk songs, happily discovering that they...
...Atlas intercontinental missiles. As "first generation" weapons, both the Titan and Atlas burn highly volatile liquid fuels that require a trouble-plagued network of pumps and pipes. Fueling and firing the Titan and Atlas is an intricate business-many experts doubt that they would ever get off the pad with just 15 minutes' warning. In contrast, the Minuteman burns a solid, rubberlike fuel developed by Thiokol Chemical Corp. Once the Minuteman is fueled, it needs little maintenance, can be stored indefinitely and can be fired, from command to blastoff, in just 30 seconds...
...held up for a while because of minor troubles with the capsule's telemetry system. Enos, who is called by his trainers "a meditative chimp," did not seem to mind. Snug in his air-conditioned nest, he waited patiently. At 10:07, the Atlas roared off its pad, climbed above Cape Canaveral and arced toward the northeast. It curved into orbit about 100 miles...