Word: verbalizations
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Chávez considers his bravado his chief asset, but critics say it too often makes it hard to take him seriously as a statesman. While Ahmadinejad wowed U.S. audiences with his verbal dexterity last week, Chávez seemed only to enhance his reputation for gratuitous Bush baiting. After Chávez's speech at the General Assembly, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, called the performance "a comic-strip approach to international affairs." A product of Venezuela's llanos, or rural plains, Chávez patterns his style after the straight-talking llaneros (cowboys) he grew up with...
...Clarity," ironically, happens to be the verbal scrim the Administration has used to cover its agenda in pushing legislation on the treatment and judicial fate of terrorism suspects, which effectively rolls back key provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The President repeatedly insisted that the legislation is needed so that American officials interrogating suspected terrorists know what they can and cannot do, and, more darkly, that they know they won't be prosecuted for what they do. Of course, the competing measure sent forward by the Armed Services Committee Thursday night is also clear - maybe "don't torture" is a little...
...inside a giant magnet. Since speaking aloud activates regions of the brain that could swamp lie-detection results, subjects are asked yes-or- no questions and then instructed to push a button to answer. Maybe the brain operates the same way with a push-button fib as with a verbal one--but maybe it doesn't. And because we all do a certain amount of self-censorship--telling white lies to avoid hurt feelings, for example--signs of activity in the relevant brain regions do not necessarily make you a criminal. "All fMRI lie-detection studies report findings in parts...
...difference between talking in person and talking via technology is like the difference between an essay question and a True/False question. In face-to-face contact, far more than words are used to communicate. Tone is established, and para-verbal cues register mood. It's a lot harder to tell a convincing lie in person, and it's a lot harder to feign confidence. Rather than learn to manage these moments, we've punted it over to a realm where none of that matters...
...delicious retribution. "If anything happened to Velda I'd tear the guts out of some son-of-a-bitch!" he muses in One Lonely Night. "I'd nail him to a wall and take his skin off him in inch-wide strips!" Other times, he keeps the violence strictly verbal, on the level of threat: "It's not easy to talk when you've just choked on your own teeth." And once in a while he gets to do it: "I only gave him a second to realize what it was like to die then I blew the expression clean...