"What a wonderful and perfect phrase, unimproved in all the metaphorical groping that in recent years has sought to capture and describe the essence of that voice".
– Jenna Wortham Web Economy Jargon Generator Dack.com | At a loss for the perfect phrase to make your PowerPoint authoritative and incomprehensible?
And, as a spindoctor and former tabloid editor, he had the perfect phrase: "When the spokesman needs a spokesman it's time to move on".
I found myself much more interested in the way things were said than what was being said — the way the right word seemed to have been custom-crafted just for that little chunk of melody, or how the saddest part of a chorus coincided impossibly with the perfect phrase.
Ms. Foreman, a marketing consultant in Chicago, found the perfect phrase for this scut work that seems to keep expanding even as you cross chores off the list: administrivia.
One dissident has the perfect phrase for the national ailment: "a learned hopelessness".
The drug was never created for the party crowd, but the "designer drug" label stuck as the perfect phrase both to glamorise and demonise the fashionable new high.
While some people might like to stare fixedly at a silent pool of blue, blue water -- Zen meditators, say, or poets grasping for the perfect phrase -- Mr. Tineo, like most lifeguards, likes action.
In addition to finding the perfect phrase — ideally one missed by the myriad competitors bidding to be linked with Google search terms — it is important to cut any losses from terms that are expensive and not yielding many customers.
But Johnson was rather too good at connecting with the popular mood, at turning the perfect phrase, at echoing and, to some extent, manipulating the popular press, and got the result he almost certainly didn't want.
