4.Eager to get in on the action, friends, cabdrivers, and schoolteachers told me they'd started flipping houses, everyone suddenly fluent in the language of balloon payments, adjustable-rate mortgages, and the Case-Shiller Index.
5.There were two or three pictures of the forest at Fontainebleau and several of streets in Paris: my first feeling was that they might have been painted by a drunken cabdriver. I was perfectly bewildered.