tall, brown hair, slate-gray eyes. Citizen. Honest, sober, civic-minded, slightly antisocial...."

He looked at me, questioningly.

"I'd rather not discuss that, sir, if you don't mind."

"Do you mind if I do mind?"

"Oh ... Oh, well if you put it like that. It's girls, sir. They block my mind. Ruin my work."

"I don't get you."

"Well, in my job--See, I've got this gift. I'm a spotter."

"A what?"

"A spotter. I can't be fooled. By advertising. Or mostly anything else. Except girls.""I'm still not sure that I--"
"It's like this. I designate ratios, by the minute. They hand me a new ad, and I read it by a stopwatch. Then, as soon as I spot the clinker, they stop the watch. If I get it in five seconds, it passes. But if I spot it in less, they throw it out and start over again. Or is that clear? No, I guess you're still confused, sir."
"Just a bit," Baxter said.
I took a deep breath and tried again.
"Maybe an example would be better. Uh, you know the one about 'Three out of five New York lawyers use Hamilton Bond Paper for note-taking'?"
"I've heard that, yes."
"Well, the clinker--that's the sneaky part of the ad, sir, or what we call weasel-wording--the clinker in that one is that while it seems to imply sixty percent of New York lawyers, it actually means precisely what it says: Three out of five. For that particular product, we had to question seventy-nine lawyers before we could come up with three who liked Hamilton Bond, see? Then we took the names of the three, and the names of two of the seventy-six men remaining, and kept them on file."
"On file?" Baxter frowned. "What for?"
"In case the Federal Trade Council got on our necks. We could prove that three out of five lawyers used the product. Three out of those five. See?"
"Ah," said Baxter, grinning. "I begin to. And your job is to test these ads, before they reach the public. What fools you for five seconds will fool the average consumer indefinitely."
I sat back, feeling much better. "That's right, sir."
Then Baxter frowned again. "But what's this about girls?"
"They--they block my thinking, sir, that's all. Why, take that example I just mentioned. In plain writing, I caught the clinker in one-tenth of a second. Then they handed me a layout with a picture of a lawyer 

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