Hasn't she, and everyone else who harasses my son because he's a thumb-sucker, ever experienced, or at least heard of, oral gratification?

Kara Angelone's 3-year-old daughter Addie was a thumb-sucker from day one - literally.

We were thrilled about how easy her transition to recovering thumb-sucker had been and figured we'd been spared future orthodontia expenses.

Dwight Shrute reads "the Story of the Thumb-Sucker" to the children, but is interrupted by a horrified Michael Scott.

For every inane segment on "Dateline" or plodding thumb-sucker on PBS, there is a smart, innovative documentary elsewhere.

What would have been a page-16 thumb-sucker about a Republican if it had made the paper at all was turned into a crucible for discussing crypto-racism in the GOP.

In "Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher" (The Story of the Thumb-Sucker), a mother warns her son not to suck his thumbs.

My neighbor poked me in the ribs and called me a thumb-sucker and I poked her back just in time for the teacher to return and witness only my transgression.

Are they relevant to understanding how things really work in this capital or it is just the stuff of gossip, innuendo and titillation used to enliven an otherwise boring dinner party or media thumb-sucker?

If you are going to criticize critics, you have to be a better critic than he is in this essentially unresearched piece, which is excellent only as an example of the off the top of the head thumb-sucker genre.

It's a real thumb-sucker of a comedy; the theatergoer sits patiently as Mr. Guare spreads his toys out around his ontological playroom - the playroom being an iceberg off the coast of Norway - and waits for the fun to start.

Secretly he had been afraid that, after retiring from the government and writing his memoirs, he'd be gradually marginalized, treated as an eminence grise, invited to appear on Nightline once in a while, and to write the occasional thumb-sucker for the New York Times Op-Ed page.

Just consider the serial posturings of your average panel discussion - the sycophantic introductions, the flattering references by the panelists to one another's work, the showtime vehemence of the professional radical, the slow-talking gravity of the emeritus thumb-sucker, the pompous pose of cogitation that symposiasts adopt as they pretend to listen to the other speakers.