Word: dinned
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...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...
...Everyday Din. While it is known that too much noise causes fatigue, irritability, even loss of sexual desire, nobody is yet certain of the effects of the drone of decibels that 20th century Americans have come to accept as normal. "Ears are not damaged by the normal sounds of life," says Newman. But some disagree. Audiologist Moe Bergman, director of the Speech and Hearing Center at Manhattan's Hunter College, studied a group of African tribesmen who never heard any outside noises but jungle sounds, compared his findings with a study of a group of Angelenos who worked...
...come to pass like this: the Clan members had all been to the penny-fights and Aldershot it, and they were lying around Palm Springs or Vegas talking of gin and beer. Someone turned on the box, and there, on the Old Old Show, was the 1939 rouser Gunga Din, with Gary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Wouldn't it be a gas, someone else inquired, to remake Gunga Din with Sammy Davis Jr. as the water...
...really, as it turns out. The Khyber Pass becomes old West Injun country, British regimentals become U.S. cavalrymen, and Gunga Din's tame elephant becomes Sammy Davis' big white mule. But Sinatra is no Grant, Dean Martin no McLaglen, and Peter Lawford, a man who looks undressed when not surrounded by a drawing room, is assuredly no Fairbanks. The Clansmen loaf kiddingly through their parts, acquiring suntans. No one, of course, bothers to look bothered as the hostiles approach. Such expressions as are evident reflect the sudsy affability of a pipe fitters' picnic (Hey, get a load...
...California's 15,717,204.) To keep up with the state's fabulous growth and get ready for still more, California's builders have energetically churned out new subdivisions, new highways, new schools, new water projects&#new; everything. But last week, over the din of bulldozers and carpenters' hammers, a citizens' committee sounded a note of alarm and warning. In the heedless rush to keep up with the demand for more and more, warned the committee, the builders are transforming California into a mass of "slurbs-sloppy, sleazy, slovenly, slipshod semi-cities...