Word: cocktailing
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...develop your businesses. That's what the money has been loaned to you for-not just for buying more wives." Polygamy also posed a problem in Manhattan, where a United Nations delegate from a small, French-speaking West African country complained of his loneliness at a Manhattan cocktail party last week. "Back home I have three wives," he explained sadly, "but my country cannot afford to send them all with me. And I cannot afford to pick just one of them...
Warm Seats & Melted Silver. In Chichester last week for the 100-mile Goodwood International Grand Prix, Moss played himself to the hilt. Supercharged and sassy, he played croquet, guzzled fruit juice at a cocktail party thrown by the Duke of Richmond and Gordon (whom he irreverently called "Your Gryce" in a broad Cockney accent), stayed up twisting at a country dancehall until 2 a.m. On race morning, while other drivers, taut and nervous, brooded over seltzer and coffee, he happily downed a huge breakfast, described the novel furnishings he was planning for his bachelor digs in London: a heated toilet...
...Tower of Babel had nothing on the modern cocktail party, whose disparate clatter and chatter has long fascinated linguists, novelists, sociologists and sound engineers-as well as the imbibers. Unconsciously, every cocktail-partygoer performs an unusual feat as he sips his gin amid the din: while carrying on his own dazzling conversation, he is able simultaneously to monitor the surrounding babble for such important items as the sound of his own name or a verbal pass at a lady friend. How does the human organism perform these intellectual gymnastics? Fascinated by what they call "the cocktail-party problem," two British...
Sonar for Boredom. Dr. Colin Cherry, 48, professor of telecommunication at London's Imperial College of Science and Technology, and Psychologist Neville Moray of Sheffield University got interested in the cocktail-party problem through their studies on the directional nature of human hearing. They kept their eyes and ears open at cocktail parties, but did their actual sound research in the laboratory-the cocktail parties were too noisy. They discovered that the seasoned partygoer does not face the person he is listening to, but turns only one ear toward him, while using the other ear as if it were...
...fired at his brain at once, say the scientists, the listener can still select the most interesting one by turning his head to varying angles, thus subtly altering the relative time delays of each source as it reaches his ear. One reason the brain can work so efficiently at cocktail parties, says Dr. Cherry, is that most of the conversations are a mixture of basic cliches that do not tax the intelligence. "Once the brain perceives that something is part of a cliché" he says, "it switches off and starts groping for another message." When is it hardest...