Word: chatter
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Books for older children are also a problem. Many are still written by English authors whose upper-class vocabulary, easy for a literate nine-year-old in Britain, is at a level sometimes not reached by American children until they are older. As a result, all that wholesome British chatter about ripping adventures during the long hols seems, well, childish-and alien corn to boot. To provide up-to-date reading, American juvenile writers have for some years been drearily confronting such Now subjects as sex, violence and drugs...
...Slightly Irregular Fire Engine by Donald Barthelme. Unpaged. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $4.95. Fantasist Barthelme goes through his own looking glass and comes back with a young Alice named Mathilda, some elegant chatter, "a hithering thithering Djinn," and a Chinese lunch that includes sweet and sour ice cream. Most of the pictures-cutouts culled from Victorian-style engravings -are too static for children, though the storm scene (from Gustave Doré's illustrations for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) is splendid...
From the playroom comes the chatter of happy voices. Little figures are dancing to rock music, while off in one corner a paddle-ball game goes on. A demure little blonde quietly recites nursery rhymes. Other little ones busily tidy up, sing and pour tea. None of the active figures is human; all are toys. Around them, real children stand silently, watching their dolls perform...
...chance that they had detected the beacon of an advanced civilization. The LGMs were later named pulsars and recently identified as natural phenomena: the long-sought neutron stars. Despite man's failure to pick up any interstellar communications, however, the entire galaxy could be filled with chatter between advanced civilizations, transmitted by a technique still undiscovered on earth. Says Carl Sagan: "We may be very much like the inhabitants of an isolated valley in New Guinea who communicate with villages in the next valley by drum and runner but have no idea that there is a vast international radio traffic...
...liberal arts, my interviewer told me the suspense-filled story of "The Tiger and the Lady." Then I was told that the story of the tiger and the lady had the impact or even substance of talking about X-ray analysis. I regret that the acute importance of cocktail chatter had to be shown to me in this way, but I laugh because the Harvard guest feels so threatened by my presence. LISA KLEIN A Metallurgy major...