Word: verbalizations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps Nixon would give out more if the East Room had not become an arena for posturing and verbal bloodletting: skepticism overwhelms reason, anger buries thoughtfulness. It is so big and its staging now so elaborate that it resembles something from Cecil B. DeMille and not a seminar for learning about the problems of the real world...
...become almost embarrassingly routine for Soviet officials to attack Andrei Sakharov for criticizing Russian repression. Recently the Soviet physicist changed his target to the Middle East war and, true to form, he ran into trouble for his views. This time, however, he did not get the verbal abuse he receives so often in the Soviet press, but rather 75 minutes of terror at the hands of two Arab activists...
Internally, too, the characters are furiously trying to keep things from popping out of their skin. Their ping-pong verbal exchanges--all wrist-action--are fast and funny and ultimately uncommunicative. These people don't talk, they bounce word-pellets off each other. Everything ricochets with the angle of conditioned response, an idiom of cliche, more like music than words--a high-pitched constant background. Their tough, jabbing control in conversation speaks of boys who have grown up together, pulled farther apart and more jealous of each other as they go along. Indeed, we get a connecting sense throughout...
...gets packed with 43 people again and see if the bus isn't also filled with chatter, giggles, smiles and stories of filled phone booths. You should have been with us the time two junior high toughs had stalemated themselves in a fight which had reached the point of verbal threats and hair pulling. It really appeared that they did not want to keep fighting but did not know how to get out of it without losing face. So, we asked Jack to stop, we all piled out and pulled them apart (they barely resisted), and then we went...
SOONER or later, however, Cosell always returns to his main interest: himself. He congratulates himself for his grueling schedule--as if he performed a vital service--and is impressed by his "great verbal dexterity." He recalls with pride different occasions when he badgered athletes into being interviewed only minutes before a contest, when they should not have been disturbed...