Word: chatterly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This past weekend I went to a party in one of the Harvard houses. The residents of the apartment were having the party as an experiment in personal interactions, but it turned out to be an intensive course in cocktail chatter. I was not aware of the social code that the other guest observed. The first step was to collect as many names as possible, and to address everyone by name each time he passed. The second step was to collect one piece of information about the person, but never anything that led to substantial conversation. The third step...
...even defeat by Joe Frazier has halted Muhammad All's interminable chatter. Upon his arrival in Lima, Peru, on his latest Latin American junket, Ali talked nonstop: "Most whites are bad, but I don't hate them. I just don't want to integrate with them." Was there anything he feared more than Frazier's fists? "I don't fear nothing. Oh no, I fear the tax collector more than anything else in the world." Muhammad, the former heavyweight champion, has good reason. Of the almost $30 million he has earned in the ring...
Hurst's heuristic methods have begun to achieve amazing results. Reports TIME Correspondent Jacob E. Simms: "There is a certain hardness to the student body. The usual buzzing and chatter are absent. An almost solemn silence permeates the hallways. Intense arguments go on in the student lounge. Even basketball seems to be played with unusual seriousness." The dropout rate has plummeted; this year less than 10% of Hurst's students failed to complete each semester. Members of last year's graduating class were accepted at colleges from the University of Illinois to Howard to Berkeley...
...Scott, looking dour and uncomfortable, appears as an aging, paunchy driver for the Mob who takes a job after nine years to see if he can still cut it. He gets tangled up in the ill fortunes of his passenger, a hit man with a cheap line of chatter (Tony Musante) and his girl (Trish Van Devere), who is supposed to be a moll but looks a good deal more like a Peck & Peck model. The suspense is so listless that the characters seem considerably less likely to perish from gunshot than from atrophy...
Such moments are infrequent. On a talk show that really lives or dies on the quality of the conversation, Cavett conducts the chatter at a brisk tempo and with a sense of timing and effortless whimsy that can fracture a guest as well as an audience. Once Norman Mailer teased Cavett about Rival David Frost. When Mailer rose a moment later, a book fell from his pocket. Quipped Cavett: "You dropped your copy of Dale Carnegie." Last week, after Cavett Idol Groucho Marx had trespassed repeatedly on Truman Capote's attempts to complete a sentence, Cavett asked Groucho...