Word: stammering
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...that he often seemed to lose touch with life around him. At social gatherings, he would stand alone talking silently to himself, moving his lips and smiling-although, said a friend, if someone interrupted his reverie, "he immediately began a harangue." As a classroom lecturer, he would stutter and stammer for at least a quarter of an hour before hitting his oratorical stride. Contemporaries loved to talk about the night that he got out of bed absorbed in some theory and wandered 15 miles in his dressing gown before thinking to wonder where he was. Altogether, Adam Smith was scarcely...
...stomps and his facial expressions never stop changing. If he's not accompanying himself with his Mississippi National steel-bodied acoustic guitar, then he'll play the piano or banjo or mandolin of kalimba or maracas or Spirit of '76 Fife. His raspy voice sometimes turns lyrics into a stammer reminiscent of Otis Redding. At other times, words are replaced altogether by suggestive mumbles or a bent guitar note accompanied by a telling smile. And most of the time, his audience can't help but clap, stomp and sing right along with...
...shocked when reviewers took it seriously. He confesses that the book "literally swarms" with contradictions and absurd fabrications. Mayes has Alger frolicking with a prostitute in Paris when he was actually attending divinity school in Massachusetts. The biographer invented a diary for his subject and even gave Alger a stammer and the fortitude to over come it-all done without possessing the slightest bit of evidence to back up his assertions had he been challenged...
Some of the pieces examine various methods of non-verbal communication--smiles, pauses, body language,and the semi-verbal language of the affected stammer (brought to a pitch of eloquence by the English ruling class). Shenker's quest for exotic modes of conveying meaning has led him to Italy, where he compiles a graphic lexicon of the language of gesture ("Sicilians take the Fifth by raising their chins slowly... Fondle the back of your ear and somebody's a pederast.") Venturing even further afield, he travels to the Congo for a first-hand encounter with African drum language, only...
...arguing about separation of powers, reporters are being forced to carry copies of the Constitution with them. And all those people who were reared on Perry Mason, whose steel-trap mind is always ahead of everybody else's, are wondering how come those fellows on the committee stammer, halt, fumble and they never get a witness to break down in tears and say "I did it. Take me away." I wonder...