Circus barker's talk

Usage examples of patter.

There was a patter of running feet, and Barnacle, devotedly clutching his broom, came down the ladder.

The formal music for the branle and galliard, the charconne and allemande and pavane and the Spanish minuet blew pattering like tinfoil through the peach trees, suffocated by the drawling French of English thoraxes and the polite, beautiful French of the most highly cultured courtiers in the world.

I believe that if I can perform it regularly enough then extra rehearsals, beyond stage movements, misdirection and patter, should not be necessary.

The pangolin loosed a volley of darts that pattered into the floor beside my feet.

Patter son with the following words--xenopolycythemia, hematology, pathogenesis, disease.

Pattera and her sister working away, Pattera at the big loom, her sister Serai at one of the backstrap looms.

As he watched, Pattera tucked the shuttle into a leather bracket on the loom frame and, wrapping a brown shawl around her, scurried toward the door.

Cerryl had his own suspicions, but he wanted to hear what Pattera had to say.

He glanced toward the rear gate, confident he would see Pattera there.

She turned, and Cerryl watched blankly as Pattera scurried back down the alley, the shawl over her nightdress flapping as her bare feet padded on the stones.

The way was empty, without a sign that Pattera had ever even been there.

Two girls, probably not much older than Pattera, saw the white tunics and slipped down the side way in the middle of the row of the grand houses with their now-gray trees and gardens.

I was once an apprentice to Tellis the scrivener, when Pattera and her sister lived off the Square of the Artisans.

It was not music that the little maiden made to her ear, but only motion to her body, and just as the deaf who are deaf alone are sometimes found to take pleasure in all forms of percussion, and to derive from them some of the sensations of sound--the trembling of the air after thunder, the quivering of the earth after cannon, and the quaking of vast walls after the ringing of mighty bells--so Naomi, who was blind as well and had no sense save touch, found in her fingers, which had gathered up the force of all the other senses, the power to reproduce on this instrument of music the movement of things that moved about her--the patter of the leaves of the fig-tree in the patio of her home, the swirl of the great winds on the hill-top, the plash of rain on her face, and the rippling of the levanter in her hair.

I have been privileged to become aware of the singing of a quiet tune, some of the phrases of which were directly derivative from inarticulate vegetation--the thud of glossy blue quandongs on the soft floor of the jungle, the clicking of a discarded leaf as it fell from topmost twigs down through the strata of foliage, the bursting of a seed-pod, the patter of rejects from the million pink-fruited fig, overhanging the beach, the whisper of leaves, the faint squeal where interlocked branches fret each other unceasingly, the sigh of phantom zephyrs too elusive to be felt.