p.s. to the ongoing Apple vs. NBC items, below:

How many times are journalists going to keep quoting with a straight face the PR guy from NBC talking about “attractive” pricing, anyway? Again, the quote is:

“Our negotiations were centered on our request for flexibility in wholesale pricing, including the ability to package shows together in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers.”

Is that guy attractive, er, high? And why don’t the reporters ask the direct follow-up question: Did NBC want to raise the prices on its shows on the iTunes Store, yes or no?

“Attractive” isn’t the only word that means “high” right now. “Flexible,” as one can see from the Shields quote, seems to mean that as well. Here’s another example from the Times the other day, about the producers of the new Mel Brooks musical, “Young Frankenstein,” readying the money trough:

Earlier this summer the production unveiled a tiered ticketing scale, with the tickets for the 250 or so best seats in the theater priced at $450 and $375 on weekends and matinees, a move that was criticized as much for its timing — i.e., before the show opened and achieved hit status — as for the prices themselves.

Mr. Sillerman, who said he was simply trying to make ticketing more flexible, pointed out that the show was also holding lotteries for $25 front-row seats at most performances, and reserving a large number of center-orchestra seats for sale only at the Hilton box office for the nonpremium $120 price.

There’s “flexible” again. Let’s do the math and see what flexible means here. Two hundred and fifty seats times four times the usual top ticket price equals a potential income equal to more than half again what the producers could generate in a sold-out house in the 1800-seat theater. So “flexible” in this context equals “almost 50 percent more money for the producers.”

But, that’s not all. Sillerman also says he is reserving “a large number” of seats for sale at $120, which sounds positively generous, until you remember that $120 is already at the high end of Broadway’s top normal ticket price. The writer of the Times story doesn’t describe it that way, opting instead to call that price a “nonpremium” one. I, inflexibly, call it a “greedily high” one.

So that’s the other definition of “flexible” on Broadway: “Some tickets we’ll sell at four times the normal rate, but we’ll also sell some at the high end of regular price. We don’t price every ticket insensibly high. We’re flexible!”