Word: pittering
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Like her plots, Ivy Compton-Burnett's flat in London's solidly middle-class Kensington section has resisted change for nearly 40 years. The wispy author, who wears her hair in a halo, pitter-patters about in a set of high-ceilinged rooms in which the light seems to have died long ago. The drawing room is her workshop and, since she does not know how to handle what she calls with distaste "a typing machine," she writes in longhand at a heavily scrolled oak desk, flanked by the ornate and the austere. Gilt chairs and pedestals topped...
...kidding when they said this ship was on its maiden voyage." Fortunately, saucer-eyed Lucille took her lumps with undiminished zest and even worked her putty face through one funny bit in which she and Desi, meeting for the first time in a Havana night club, swapped pitter-pats in a love duet on the bongo drums. The messages between them grew more frantic, and after beating out an abandoned rhythmic burst, Lucy shrieked in astonished self-admonition: "What am I saying...
Even when attempting coherency, however, the style in 321 is in most cases lamentable and occassionally nauseating. It plumments to its nadir of tired Timeiness in the section on polls. in which Seniors are told that they can hear "the pitter-patter of little feet...in the near distance" and that they are thirteen percent directed by "libidinous impulses, another word for raw sex." This sort of childishness suggests that the Yearbookmen are not really quite sure for whom they are writing. Indeed, it is a problem whether they should aim at the Senior or at Mother. But in either...
There were famous names among the 104, including daughters of Laurance Rockefeller, Irving Berlin and Howard Cullman, and some who were unknown beyond the limits of Scarsdale and Greenwich (one debutante came all the way from Minneapolis). Most were greeted with a proud, polite pitter-patter of applause from their parents' boxes or tables; others got ovations. When Miss Gary Latimer, who had been dubbed the "No. 1 Glamour Deb" by New York society editors, appeared, it was like the arrival of a movie queen on the 20th Century Limited: a murmur ran through the crowd, flashbulbs popped...
...Outside the station Ike was greeted by a 21-gun salute, another blast of frigid air, and a warmly friendly reception. In Confederation Square, 50,000 Canadians started a polite, gloved pitter-patter of applause, with an occasional, highly proper cry of "hey, hey" (cheering is considered improper in austere Ottawa). After he placed a wreath of red carnations and white chrysanthemums on the Cenotaph, Canada's war memorial, Ike joined Mamie and the Governor General in an open Cadillac, tucked a lap robe around their knees and rode off through the city to Rideau Hall, the Governor General...