Word: chatter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Despite the Crimson's strong morning showing, there was considerable chatter circulating among the 3500 alligator-shirt-garbed spectators about bumping off the smooth sailing Harvardians. The crowd was full of old oarsmen who had come out of their shells for the sprints, and the rowers' reunion was filled with nostalgia and projections on the upcoming races...
...accomplishes this mostly by destroying dangerously "unstable" planets. These planets, which could block the way of space pioneers, are blasted by the ship's exponential thermostellar bombs, which are also programmed for speech. As they wait in the bomb bay for their one shot at glory, the bombs chatter brightly with the spacemen. The crew, well bored with one another by this time, talk more with the machines than among themselves. Their life of daily risk is done nearly by rote. They are bleak, melancholy, and running out of toilet paper...
...swollen to 2 million by refugees. Despite the ever present danger from random Khmer Rouge rocketing, children still sing in the streets in the early evening and decorations are going up for the Cambodian New Year, April 13. But after the 9 p.m. curfew, the only sound is the chatter of small-arms fire punctuated by the thump of rockets and howitzer shells. By day, the city is ever more pathetic and dangerous. There are serious food shortages. Men dressed in army uniforms use M-79s to threaten shopkeepers, then take whatever they wish. Children who sell gasoline...
Wilson is skillful in combining 20-20 dream vision with auditory parody. In one scene, the backdrop carries the words CHITTER CHATTER printed several hundred times. Half a dozen or more couples are seated in silence at small cafe tables. Simultaneously, they all begin gesticulating and making high-pitched gibberish conversation. In comedic nonsense, this replicates every cocktail party that anyone has ever attended...
...less confining despite the fact that its boundaries are self-imposed rather than natural. Pummelled by the waters of Brattle Street, buffeted by the roaring English Channel winds of Memorial Drive, isolated by the icy North Sea depths of Quincy Street, Harvard suffocates the adventuresome with the dull academic chatter of the senior common room and the unchanging faces of the dining hall. Like their insulated Old World counterparts, Harvard students conjure up their own voyage imagery, succulent with their peculiar symbols of exotic retreats and flaming foreign splendors to help them escape from the tedium of life...