Word: ploy
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Third-Party Hope. Raising the number of U.S.-proposed sites to 15 seemed mainly a ploy to demonstrate that the U.S. was open-minded. North Viet Nam dismissed the four criteria as "absurd and insolent," and termed the lengthened list a "tortuous maneuver" to delay talks. Privately, U.S. officials have come to doubt that the North Vietnamese will accept any place on earth first suggested by the U.S. Accordingly, Washington let it be known that it was seeking proposals from third parties. At the U.N., Arthur Goldberg conferred with Secretary-General U Thant. In Washington, Rusk chatted with Soviet Ambassador...
...opera and theater, and commands a respectable following. One recognition of Newman's box-office clout is that Producer David Merrick, who calls him "the undertaker," tried to bar him from the theater and demanded equal time to answer an embalming review. This was a characteristic Merrick publicity ploy, but then Merrick judged his adversary shrewdly...
...John), a free spirit who sponges on Daddy for the cost of living. Beany is a dove on Viet Nam, and he has brought home a Negro sweetie (Carol Cole) to wed. In short, the boy is a one-man international drawing-room crisis. Vidal's cute switch ploy on the miscegenation problem is to present the girl's parents as prim, upper-middle-class social conservatives who are adamantly opposed to an interracial match. They dread what their Westchester County neighbors might say, and cringe at the notoriety of having their daughter's picture appear...
Inversions. Richler's ploy is to turn the liberal Jewish character inside out, making Mortimer an inversion of the author's own experiences as a youth in Montreal's intensively competitive Jewish enclave. Says Richler: "Our mothers read us stories from magazines about astigmatic 14-year-olds who had already graduated from Harvard. And reading Tip Top Comics or listening to The Green Hornet on the radio was as good as asking for a whack on the head-sometimes administered with a rolledup copy of the Jewish Eagle, as if that in itself would be nourishing...
...making him believe in ghosts; first by projecting a likeness of Phelps's face into a cloud of carbon dioxide in a darkened room, then by propping up the unconscious body of one of the killer's underlings and using a face mask-a favorite IMF ploy-to make him look like Phelps. The killer shoots at the face, but as he walks nearer, the mask dissolves and he finds that he has rubbed...