Word: verbalism
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...school movies, the misfit heroes are usually mocked or brutalized by the athletes. Well, it's true that the nerds' main form of exercise is masturbation, but they are every bit as competitive as the towel-snapping guys on the football team. The difference is that their aggression is verbal, not physical. Instead of wanting to score the winning touchdown, they want to top their friends in the display of ribald wit. They're joke jocks. And since they don't think girls are funny (their touchstone movie "classics" are Caddyshack and Porky's, not Earth Girls Are Easy...
...read at 3--she says she hadn't even taught him the alphabet--she wasn't sure it was so unusual. Then around age 4, he read aloud from a medical book in the doctor's office, and the doctor recommended intelligence testing. At 4, Max had the verbal skills of a 13-year-old. He skipped kindergarten, but he was still bored, and his mother despaired. No system is going to be able to keep up, she thought...
...take the microphone. She pointedly turned toward the C-SPAN crew that was filming the event and launched into a diatribe against Oprah that was even stronger than her afternoon comments. The mood in the room turned from culture to clash, as participants watched in delicious horror as the verbal grenade rolled across the room...
Talese continued her verbal barrage via e-mail Sunday with Dallas Morning News book critic Michael Merschel, a panelist at the conference, who detailed the exchange on his blog and in a column Monday. Talese was unapologetic for publishing the book, Merschel said, and she described Winfrey to him as "holier-than-thou" and her talk-show audience as reminiscent of a "Roman circus." The upcoming C-SPAN BOOK-TV show is certain to stir the waters. Winfrey, so far, has declined to comment. With reporting by Laura Fitzpatrick/New York
...games till somebody loses his head. As anybody who has even looked sideways at the Internet knows, anonymity has a disastrously disinhibiting effect on human behavior. Freed of any possibility that their words will be connected to their actual identities, anonymous Internet posters have charted historic new depths of verbal offensiveness. Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, has called for posters to own up to their Internet alter egos, arguing that "if we are to save the Internet, we need to confront the curse of anonymity...