Word: jabber
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Bartlet is antiabortion and a military hawk, for instance. But the real and admirable radical idea here is that people might still be passionate about principle, about government, about their jobs. When he's not indulging his you-can't-handle-the-truth side, Sorkin spins witty, hypercaffeinated office jabber with an intensity that's easier to buy from folks who have the Bomb than from sportscasters. That and an ensemble including ice-cool Rob Lowe and the deadpan, woebegone Richard Schiff make this freshman White House worth cutting slack for--for now. This is, after all, no cream-puff...
...high and low brain activity. "Parents may be conveying to their children a franticness about doing everything right." University of Chicago psychology professor Janellen Huttenlocher, who reported correlations between the size of toddlers' vocabularies and how much their mothers talk to them, fears that parents may feel compelled to jabber incessantly around their kids. "Some mothers won't even take a job because of it," she says. "If you're a well-educated, interested mother, you shouldn't think about the findings one way or another...
...across the tracks and across the freeway, is supernaturally tidy. In the spotless kitchen, at a spotless table next to a box filled with hundreds of empty beer cans all conscientiously rinsed and crushed (when crankers decide to clean house, they clean house), Jennifer and her roommates smoke and jabber while clock hands turn from 3 to 4 to 5. The oldest roommate--his fortyish, gaunt face so stiff and lifeless it looks taxidermied--veers from a fond recollection of a camping trip to a paranoid rant about "hidden cameras" and warnings to TIME's photographer and reporter that...
...domestic crisis and political intrigue, pushed to the back of Sunday magazines and relegated to Wednesday supplements. Men of power and women of means do not deign to discuss the particulars of a succulent piece of quail or the lightness of a perfectly-cooked souffle, preferring instead to jabber about the stock market or their pet poodles. They do not understand the obsession of the "foodie," the person for whom the best of life can be summed up in one divine meal...
American movies are all talk, no listen. Jabber jabber, feint feint -- conversation is combat, a schoolyard dissing contest, a slightly more sophisticated version of "Your mother!" "No, yours!" In real life, and in French movies, people pretend to get along when they talk. They keep things light, genial, talking around the issues that burn them up inside. Some love affairs never begin because people are afraid to reveal what they feel; "I love you" is so hard to say. Some marriages can last a lifetime on the tacit agreement that hostilities will go unexpressed. The static is in the silences...