Word: newport
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...used-car dealer in Washington, N.C., hadn't got rid of that red and white 1978 Chrysler Newport so fast, it would have been easier for the big-city reporter to unravel the mystery that is still swirling around this little town. Because if the reporter had been able to examine the Chrysler, he might have found tell-tale traces of paint. And according to Gertrude Baker, the paint happened to be there because an outraged neighbor splattered it on the car after Dominique Wilkins, her son by an earlier marriage, decided to enroll in the University of Georgia...
...hadn't had much exposure to anything," recalls Speech-Language Pathologist Alexa Romain, who was assigned to Gracie. "They wanted attention." The twins were soon attending severe language disorder classes at nearby Beale Elementary School and clinical therapy sessions three times a week. Psycholinguists Richard Meier and Elissa Newport were brought in from the nearby University of California campus, to study and decode the girls' hyperspeed chatter...
...unintelligible. The hospital decided to video-tape therapy sessions so linguists and speech pathologists could first slow it down, then analyze at leisure the relationship between obvious garbles like "pintu" (pencil), "nieps" (knife) and "ho-ahks" (orange) and real-life objects they apparently represented. Meier and Newport began laborious phonetic transcriptions to break the twins' dialogue down to traceable parts...
Whether it was developed from loneliness or as a rebellious game or was simply a neurological accident, the twins' private communication has turned out to be something less than a true invented language. Linguists Meier and Newport now call Gracie and Ginny's speech "deformed English." What had seemed to be a vocabulary of hundreds of new words, when slowed down and analyzed on tape recordings proved to be about 50 complex mispronounced words and phrases jammed together and said at high speed. There was also "substantial variation" every time the twins talked. Phonetic transcripts initially brought...
...reason for such fatalism is that American assassins have generally not been political foes whose acts might be anticipated but psychotics or social misfits who kill for bizarre and unpredictable reasons. Says Robert Delaney, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and an expert on terrorists: "The most frustrating thing is that you are dealing with a randomness. There is no knowing when, how or if." Or why or who. Researchers say that assassins in U.S. history have typically been short, white, unmarried men with mental disturbances dating from their childhood. True, but both attempts on Ford...