Word: conversationalist
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...problem with having a machine for a buddy, of course, is that it does not make a very good conversationalist -but the scientists are busy fixing that. Until now computer experts could only communicate with their machines in one of 1,700 special languages, such as COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), Fortran (Formula Translation), MAD (Michigan Algorithmic Decoder) and JOVIAL (Jules's Own Version of the International Algebraic Language). All of them are bewildering mixtures that only the initiated can decipher. Now some computers have reached the point where they can nearly understand-and reply in-plain English...
Whence and whither this prodigy, I wondered. He turned out to be a warm, approachable person and a voluble conversationalist. He punctuates his talk frequently with such queries as, "D'you know what I mean?" and, on being reassured, hurries right on to another point...
...called hitchhiking, and although many a student with a sign (GOOD CONVERSATIONALIST ALBUQUERQUE PLEASE) can still be seen, express ways and police are driving the custom out of style. But in Europe, the autostop, as hitchhiking is known in internationalese, is a thriving student institution. In universities across the Continent, and on many U.S. campuses too, college kids are about to dust off knapsacks and take to the open Autobahnen, routes nationales, carreteras and autostrade...
...eyes of the British, eccentricity often looks like genius. In his own time (1731-1802), Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, was renowned not only as Britain's foremost physician but as a poet, scientist, inventor and conversationalist of formidable talent. He had, said Coleridge, "a greater range of knowledge than any other man in Europe," and King George III begged him to come to London as the royal physician (he refused, on the ground that he preferred to remain in Lichfield). The age's other great eccentric, Samuel Johnson, dismissed him as a provincial from an "intellectually barren...
...blue corduroy pants. Hard-lick guitar, whooping harmonica, skinny little voice. Beardless chin, shaggy sideburns, porcelain pussycat eyes. At 22, he looks 14, and his accent belongs to a jive Nebraskan, or maybe a Brooklyn hillbilly. He is a dime-store philosopher, a drugstore cowboy, a men's room conversationalist. And when he describes his young life, he declares himself dumfounded at the spectacle. "With my thumb out, my eyes asleep, my hat turned up an' my head turned on," says Bob Dylan, "I's driftin' and learnin' new lessons...