Word: pattering
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Nidaros" (pronounced Nee-dar-oss)?effective Jan. 1, 1930. To many a Trondhjemmer's ear the sound of "Nidaros" is ugly, coarse, repugnant. Soon 25,000 irate citizens (nearly half Trondhjem's population) mass-met under a lowering sky, furiously handclapped speeches of indignation as rain began to patter, signed under umbrellas a potent petition of protest. On dispersing to their homes they expressed their feelings further by breaking several Trondhjem windows...
...Society of American Magicians (total membership about 1,650), held their annual convention last week in Manhattan and brotherly baffling was the order of the hour. The magicians dined and danced. Then, in secret session, they baffled each other and exchanged secrets about new or improved apparatus, magicianly "patter" (conversation) and humor, the art of distracting the attention of the tricked from the trickery...
...hour and ten minutes Hearts in Dixie takes to run. The voodoo doings, the cotton pickings and Bible-shoutings are just what a certain class of people, educated to consider Negro life "colorful" and "primitive" expect of the race, just as people of another class expect vaudeville patter and tap-dancing. The pathos, based upon the low temperature of the ground enclosing somebody named Massa, is repetitious. All is redeemed, however, by the humor of a gaunt, pop-eyed blackamoor named Stepin Fetchit, cast as "Gummy," laziest of blackamoor husbands. The unpretentious story, genuinely moving at its best...
...Significance. Such, expressed with infinite restraint, is the terrific indictment against an indifferent generation. A girl's lover is killed-she feels no emotion; a country is in revolt, "the best people" pay no attention. Not that they do not love their Ireland: their patriotism flowers in smart patter about their vulgar cousins, the English-"they tell the most extraordinary things-about their, husbands, their money affairs, their insides. They don't seem discouraged by not being asked. And they all seem so intimate with each other ... of course they seem very definite and practical...
...addition to all this there is a dog act, one Jack Osterman whose patter is pretty dreadful, and Miss Sylvia Clark who may possibly have feelings so we just won't say anything. The good act is an acrobatic one in which one Pete Michon succeeds in throwing himself about the stage in a manner never to be equalled again, unless he comes around for a return engagement...