Chatter Boxen

Something unkind to say about a person is that so-and-so is a chatter box.  This kind of put down may be less necessary in cultures where people are more glued to their devices and therefore more likely to delegate chattering to the professional chatterboxen who do it for a living.

Bringing up Hugh Kenner at this juncture is a kind of no-brainer.  He was writing about Eliza and such early in the computer revolution.  I have a distinct memory of him getting Eliza and Racter to talk with one another ("talk") in an article in Byte Magazine (McGraw-Hill) for which he wrote a column.

One needn't have a highly developed sense of irony to see everyone cranking out variations of the same article.  The writer does some "research" (reads other articles), then "digests", then puts it back out there in a grammatical form.  Does the chatter box do any less?  The game is to get the next word right.  Stick to beaten paths.

Naturally the chatter boxen trigger various insecurities.  The automated dolls, the miniature robots, made by the French, were unsettling back then (around the time of The Turk).