Word: chatterly
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Intelligence services were picking up enough chatter about a terrorist attack to scare the pants off top officials. On June 22, the Defense Department put its troops on full alert and ordered six ships from the Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, to steam out to sea, for fear that they might be attacked in port. U.S. officials thought an attack might be mounted on American forces at the nato base at Incirlik, Turkey, or maybe in Rome or Belgium, Germany or Southeast Asia, perhaps the Philippines--anywhere, it seems, but in the U.S. When Independence Day passed without incident, Clarke...
...world together. Taken for granted by kings and butchers alike, it is an indispensable companion that serves without favor or prejudice. It has reached into every civilized corner of the world--and often brought civilization with it. From its wires spring the words of history in the making, the chatter of daily life. English Novelist Arnold Bennett called it "the proudest and the most poetical achievement of the American people"...Millions of Americans pick up the telephone to get the weather or the correct time, shopping news, stock market quotations, recorded prayers, bird watchers' bulletins, and even (in Boston) advice...
...death, a commercially overdriven event that's sure to set off a howl of commentary about the King as American tragedy, as vulnerable transgressive, as daring racial-boundary breaker, as revolutionary synthesizer of musical styles, and on and on. Not that there is anything inappropriate about all the heady chatter. Our famous American dead accrue layers of interpretation through the years and become palimpsests of cultural meaning. Like Elvis, born to poor parents in Depression-era Mississippi, our pop figures usually follow an arc from nowhere to somewhere, and so by talking about them we reassure ourselves about the promise...
...first battle of President George W. Bush's war on Iraq is already underway - but Washington, rather than Baghdad, is the battlefield. All summer the chatter over whether, where and how to use U.S. military force to bring down Saddam Hussein has grown increasingly urgent. Hardly a day goes by without some new battle plan being leaked to the media or some ally warning against going to war. Virtually everyone agrees the world would be a better place without Saddam. But that's about all they agree on, leaving the President's advisers and allies fiercely divided on what...
...incense, the touch of candle wax, the overly starched cotton of my surplice as I knelt before the sacred mystery of the Eucharist: in the words of the poet Philip Larkin, "a serious house on serious earth" this was, a refuge and a beacon, a rebuke to the chatter and trivia and destabilizing noise of the world outside and beyond. And the knowledge that these rituals, these words, these miracles, had been going on for centuries and centuries, reaching back to small groups of confused followers in the aftermath of the Resurrection, only intensified the awe I felt and still...