Word: pattering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Walt Disney World, the snappy patter is left to the guides on the trams that whisk visitors from the car lot to one of the two main parks: the Magic Kingdom--which is basically Disneyland East--and the sprawling Epcot Center. (One-day admission: $23 for adults, $19 for kids.) "No smoking--foreign, domestic or homegrown," one guide sasses near Epcot's 18-story Spaceship Earth geosphere. "You know what Epcot means?" another asks near closing time. "Every Person Comes Out Tired." In fact, the acronym stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. It was Disney's conceit to create...
Most movies about low-life Americana condescend to their subject with lots of sweat, foul patter, fat ladies and idiot giggling. This lurid and intermittently seductive melodrama (based on a true story) just observes Brad Sr. and his mob dispassionately, like slime mold under a microscope. They execute their robberies, and their victims, with soulless professionalism; their gangster grimaces register starkness without sexiness. Brad Jr. and his pals are hardly more exemplary. Talking tough, swigging beer, waiting for something bad to happen, they could be the Whitewood Gang in embryo...
...this swirls around the surly character of Joe, TV's most convincing misanthrope since Archie Bunker. In Boyle's sharp and unsentimental portrayal, crustiness never becomes cute, and there are echoes of authentic urban despair in the patter. "What are you gonna do over the weekend?" Willie asks Joe, whose wife left him 15 years ago. "Same as I always do. Sit it out till Monday," he replies. Willie nags him to get out of the apartment and make friends. "I had friends," Joe snaps. "I didn't like it." At the end of one episode, Joe is even found...
Their shallow preliminary chatter seems irreconcilable with a heartfelt faith. Either they were mindlessly falling into a sort of carnival barker's patter, or they were consciously, and cunningly, manipulating a friendly overture into a "sale." This kind of superficiality is nauseating even in vacuum salesmen. A religious faith should be an unadorned conviction to be candidly and sincerely shared; it should not be the tail-end proposition of a maze of small-talk...
...hosted NBC's professional football coverage before replacing Tom Brokaw on Today in 1982, has rapidly grown into an incisive interviewer adept at cutting through mushy answers. During an interview with Louisiana's slick Governor Edwin Edwards last month, for example, Gumbel kept sweeping away the politician's charming patter to discuss the impact of Edwards' recent indictment on conspiracy charges. For her part, Pauley displays a more empathetic style, laced with a self-deprecating wit, that works best when she is discussing topics of high emotion. Together, "Gumpaul" (as the pair is called in-house) projects a casual, good...