Word: pattered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...brief, silent spark of recognition inevitably interrupts their last pre-exam moments. This recognition leaves them a little more secure, a little more puzzled, and quite a bit more amused than they had been an instant before. They have seen the familiar face. They have heard the soothing patter. Once again they are face-to-face with a Harvard institution--the inscrutable, ubiquitous Mr. Test...
...reported to the OWCP." Those who believe that Babel can be located somewhere south of Sacramento have derived aid and discomfort from Richard Rosen's new volume, Psychobabble. On the downhill arc of the Me Decade, Rosen split an infinitive and savages cant as he collects "psychological patter, whose concern is to faithfully catalogue the ego's condition." Examples: "Very laid back," "I know where you're coming from" and "Go with the flow." Rosen was abetted by Novelist Cyra McFadden (The Serial), a resident of Marin County, where, she claims, such "mindless prattle" rises before...
...another class, this one in U.S. history, the teacher keeps up a patter of jokes and badinage. A discussion of economic competition sends him off on constant tangents. "I've got to borrow some pens," he says, leaping up and racing around the circle of desks in the room. His point, although garbled, is that pen manufacturers must be careful not to overprice or their products won't sell. When a student volunteers that his Bic pen cost 39¢, it strikes the teacher as a revelation. "Really? Have they gone up that much?" The kids loll back, tittering. "Would...
...psychological patter of the '70s is as inescapable as Muzak and just as numbing: Are you relating? Going through heavy changes? In touch with yourself and doing your own thing? Are you up front, or just hung up and uptight? Boston Writer R.D. (for Richard Dean) Rosen calls it psychobabble, and in his new book by that title (Atheneum, $8.95) sees America awash in soggy therapeutic clichés. "One hears it everywhere, like endless panels of a Jules Feiffer cartoon," Rosen writes, "this institutionalized garrulousness ... this need to catalogue the ego's condition...
...would have been easy for Cole to fall into the role of dilettante, composing patter songs to amuse his intimates. Instead, as Alec Wilder observes in his classic treatise, American Popular Song, "the body of [Porter's] work shows clearly that he constantly sought to maintain a high level, not of social frippery, but of professional craftsmanship." Cole worked as hard as he played. Each morning he would sit down at the piano for three hours. When he went on a cruise he took-along with his tailored dinner jackets and crates of his favorite champagne-a piano organ...