They are either moving to Manhattan or live in the city part-time and covet her contacts, which she uses to link them with interior designers, contractors, art dealers or potential social acquaintances.
As we have seen, the familiar experience of temporarily failing to notice one's pain while engrossed in conversation serves as a potential illustration of acquaintance.
(Just how many Gold Coasts does America have, anyway?) Suddenly she was bantering about crown moldings, dismissing everything built before 1970 as a "knockdown," and sizing up old acquaintances as potential buyers or sellers.
When the partners drew up a lengthy list of potential investors, many were political acquaintances, they said, but others were not.
Instead of going to people they know well, this particular group searches for work by going to people most of them do not know well at all, using the Internet and a 30-year-old social theory called "the strength of weak ties" to create electronic Rolodexes listing the names of thousands of acquaintances who are potential employers.
The scientists asked the women to rate the four men on various measures of attraction: how much they liked the men; how much they'd like to collaborate on a project; how much they'd like the men as friends, casual acquaintances or as potential boyfriends.
Because of the rules of the federal judiciary, Combs had to liquidate his business and banking assets and severely restrict contact with many of his political acquaintances to avoid potential conflicts of interest with cases he might adjudicate on the Court of Appeals.
His cellphone, he says, holds the numbers of some 100 potential lineup fillers, mostly friends and acquaintances from the Mill Brook Houses, the public housing project in the South Bronx where he has lived most of his life.
Seven were potential sexual partners, and three were acquaintances of the participants; six of the ten were unaware of their status.
