Word: banter
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...Brian Friel (Philadelphia, Here I Come!) that find tears in youthful exuberance and laughter in domestic conflict. In Winners, the curtain raiser, a betrothed young Irish couple joke and dream on a hilltop, planning their wedding, mocking the nuns and priests who have taught them. As they banter, a narrator (Art Carney), introduces a fragment of the future-the couple drown in a nearby lake. These are their last hours on earth, which take on new sweetness and meaning as the afternoon and their lives inexorably draw to a close...
...Message. He has employed banter shrewdly, both to keep his audiences interested and to appear unruthless. In Tecumseh, Neb., the wind tore a scrap of paper from his hand. "That's my farm program," he said. "Give it back quickly." Of course, he has done more to raise farm prices than anyone else; just think, he says, of the milk, eggs and bread his children consume. Are his crowds packed with the young? "I'm going to lower the voting age to seven." What about all that money he's spending? He quotes from Jack: "I have a message from...
...Genteel Banter. M.I.T. Humanities Professor Louis Kampf contends that many English teachers now recoil from stressing literature's illumination of life. They fear that voicing strong opinions is not only "a bad breach of manners," but might jeopardize their careers; thus confine themselves to "genteel banter." Historian Staughton Lynd, who has carried his beliefs into angry dissent from the Viet Nam war, criticizes historians who limit themselves to defining and analyzing forces in society. He asks acidly: "Should we be content with measuring the dimension of our prison instead of chipping, however inadequately, against the bars...
...Henleys are one of London's classiest fashion shows. Thousands line the Thames, their bonnets, banners, and banter the heightening the race's attraction...
Another student--the only one of the nine who said he had taken LSD "fairly frequently"--talked at length about what made him retreat to drugs. Planes of talk range from functional, housekeeping exchanges through gossip, banter, ideological disputes, to metaphysical discussions, he said, and it is not difficult for two people to fix themselves at the same point on this scale of conversational levels. But there is another dimension to communication, where mutuality is almost impossible to achieve, he said. That is intimacy, an "ultimate intimacy not obtained by shared confessions of guilts, ambitions, Oedipus complexes, or secrets...