Word: shorthanded
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...everyone knows about the McGuffin-Alfred Hitchcock's pet name for the object (microfilm or rare jewels) that kicks off the action in a suspense film. Less renowned, but just as important, is "the clock." This is movie shorthand for the deadline toward which villains push their mean plans and against which the virtuous struggle mightily. Two-Minute Warning, which concerns a sniper (Warren Miller) in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, has more clocks than a Swiss trade show...
...tale is dominated by his relationship with his sister Eliza. Yes, it is incestuous, but as in Ada, incest has a private, figurative significance. Wilbur's and Eliza's love and loneliness are conveyed in a slurry of short scenes, part science fiction, part dreamlike shorthand, whose allusions the author seems unwilling to share fully with his reader. Instead of ideas, he offers whimsy; instead of feeling, merely sentiment. Vonnegut calls his method "situational poetry...
...Minister Ian Smith's security forces looked up from his post on downtown Jameson Avenue as the season's first dark rain clouds came scudding over the rooftops. "Damn," he said, scowling to his partner. "I was hoping it would hold off a bit longer. The 'terrs' [white Rhodesians' shorthand for terrorists] will be tougher than ever in the rains this year...
...more of Commentary's intellectuals consider liberal and conservative "necessary shorthand" and, though imprecise, indispensable. Out of their individual contributions emerges a rough consensus...
...battlefields of World War I, hospital wards, lunatic asylums. The mysterious author's protagonist-narrator is a most reluctant soldier and postwar wanderer named Bardamu. Murderers, wife beaters and abortionists appear as ordinary characters in Journey. Its language-French jangled into street argot-is a kind of frenzied shorthand of pain, terror and hate...