Word: nattering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...English. He tells his apparently outrageous story wryly and wisely, by seedily leading his central characters from a Canadian carnival to the London stage, and then to a tumultuous mating with a monstrously ugly Swiss sphinx named Leisl Vitzipiit-zli. The people are brilliant talkers, but when they natter on too long, the highly theatrical author causes a grotesque face to appear at a window, drops someone through a trap door or stages a preposterous recognition scene. A master illusionist himself, Davies well deserves a packed house when-on a bare stage, out of nowhere, in a puff of smoke...
JEREMIADS SUCH AS these Newman makes against the state-of-the-union's language are as old as the day Babylonian scholars compiled a text on "Style and Form of Hieroglyphics." Any nabob with alert ears and open eyes can natter negativism about decadence in American, verbal or otherwise. More important than the fact of degeneracy are the reasons behind it. Newman does make a stab at why the American language has become so cheapened. While Watergate was making its contribution, he writes, "a different process has been under way in another sector, where respect for rules has been breaking...