Talanoa (Hindi), Idle Talk as a Social Adhesive Tim Barnes
A definition from They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases by Howard Rheingold The little hours, how they go on with idle chatter, ours and the birds’. You say something about the weather and then I do because neighbors do that and it makes the hours comfortable. Trees know this about the birds, sparrows and jays, the burbling bushtits. It is written in the leaves. Sometimes the crows get argumentative but that’s their nature, grumpy, like the old man who lived in the old Victorian on the corner used to be before he left on that long flight. Maybe he’s back, the old curmudgeon, in the crow glaring down from the telephone pole, cawing at me, grumbling something, it doesn’t matter what, about the hours palavering by.
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