Word: silents
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...merely involuntary signals of short-fused patience. Any competent psychiatrist remains alert to the tics and quirky expressions by which a patient's hidden emotions make themselves known. People even signal by the odors they give off, as Janet Hopson documents in superfluous detail in Scent Signals: The Silent Language of Sex. Actually, it is impossible for an individual to avoid signaling other people; the person who mutely withdraws from human intercourse sends out an unmistakable signal in the form of utter silence...
Sociologist Dane Archer calls reading such signals "social intelligence," but the phrase's greatest usefulness was probably in completing the title of his book How to Expand Your Social Intelligence Quotient. Urged Archer: "We must unshackle ourselves from the tendency to ignore silent behavior and to prefer words over everything else." The evidence all over is that while people meander the earth through thickets of verbiage (theirs and others), many, perhaps most, do pay more attention to wordless signals and are more likely to be influenced and governed by nonverbal messages...
Unfortunately, no useful dictionary of gestures is really possible, since every gesture and nonverbal expression depends for meaning on the variants of both the individual using it and the culture in which it takes place. Says Anthropologist Edward T. Hall, author of The Silent Language and Beyond Culture: "Because of its complexity, efforts to isolate out 'bits' of nonverbal communication and generalize from them in isolation are doomed to failure. Book titles such as How to Read a Person Like a Book are thoroughly misleading, doubly so because they are designed to satisfy the public's need...
...looking at the arguments he has left out, one can see how Fallows has shaped his argument. Reduced defense spending, for instance, holds great appeal to liberals who see more money for social programs. And though Fallows might agree, he is silent on the issue, for such talk infuriates the right, already convinced as it is that too many guns have been sacrificed for butter. His attempt to stick to the issues at hand, though, is in the end unpersuasive, for there are too many questions that need answering first. Americans of conscience will always predicate support for the military...
...discourse was punctuated by loud laughter and catcalls from the audience; debate moderator Jean-Marie Cavada asked for silence. Ponia struggled on, but Cavada interrupted with more election results to announce. "I have the figures from former justice minister Alain Peyrfitte's district," Cavada said. The T.V. studio became silent in anticipation of learning the fate of a man called a "fascist" by many on the left. In Seine-et-Marne, Alain Peyrfitte has been defeated by..." Cavada's next words were drowned out by thunderous cheers...