Word: chattering
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...character by reciting her lines as if they were cabala. Hoffman, one of the shrewdest young actors in the business, manages to be at once predator and victim. But when the film tries to make the audience care for the characters, it proves bankrupt. For beneath the Manhattan chatter and the glossy confrontations, John and Mary is as empty as a singles bar on Monday morning. Leaning on the stars' reputations, it never bothers to show who the lovers are, or how they got to be that...
...discuss at least a narrow range of subjects with intelligence and even insight. On the David Frost Show, for example, she scored a valid point in defense of romantic love when she described the female mind as "an erogenous zone." But her observations get lost in her incessant chatter and frequent malapropisms. For a time she referred to things she found attractive as "gauche" until she finally learned that the word she wanted was "chic." Editing one of her own lines in Myra, she struck out the word "germane" and substituted "superfluous...
...course of a lavish briefing. Sensing their discomfort, General Creighton Abrams broke in to start talking informally about the war; although he said nothing new, his familiarity with the reality of war brought the meeting to life. The lesson is that personal communication is better than canned chatter...
...does not accept it gladly, and the later stars in the Caxton Constellation (an English group in Gutenberg's inky way) do much to disprove his own thesis. Paradoxically, too, so will his book itself, at least temporarily, if it achieves the wide attention it deserves. "Chatter about Shelley" may be contemptible, but Shelley's chatter was often more important than most men's theses. Even lately George Orwell's essays and memoirs have achieved an influence likely to persist beyond 1984. Letters and men of letters are declining, but they are not yet entirely fallen...
...English [studies]." sniffed one history don, "chatter about Shelley." George Saintsbury, who died in 1933, is an early example of the disease of scholarship. "A journalist transformed in middle age into the most venerable of professors," he became for generations of students the "supreme exponent of English lit." He was also the classic exemplar of the winetaster theory of literature. Saintsbury, indeed, wrote with equal learning and authority on poetry and port but, alas, as if they were the same sort of thing. Pundits who teach poetry as a matter of the palate-or of professional gain-naturally detest...