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Another way of perceiving the micro-bopper would be to understand his apparatus - the way in which he communicates. The micro-bopper speaks a new language.
The use of the phrase "new languarge" is not entirely journalistic or oracular rhetoric. The micro-bopper language is to a large extent nonverbal: part gesture, part tone, part assumption, part telepathy and part words. They express themselves to each other. Conversation is highly animated, almost most theatrical. Small talk is not part of their world; communicaiton between close friends becomes esoteric, multi-leveled and intricate, and to us imcomprehensible. When we use gestures to support gestures. They have been called post-literate.
One magazine editor described the micro- bopper telepathy this way: "Just before their song was announced as No. 1 on a New York hit parade, the pre-teen members of the Cowsills, a family music group adopted by MGM Records and supported by a $250,000 publicity campaign, were moving aimlessly around their agent's office eerily communicating with each ohter in this fashion: Their own album provided background sound; they sang snatches of their music, touched each other, pushed and pulled, gradually through movement filling the office with themselves. Words were not strung together in sentences, they were used to punctuate gestures. To one of us not an understandable statement was made in twenty minutes. Yet, they seemed to be talking to each other. They were." It is not that micro-boppers are inarticulate ; they do not choose to talk.
Anthropologist Ted Carpenter sees their communication techniques as akin to that of primitive languages which utilize polysynthetic forms. "Consider the speech of primitive peoples . . . they do not separate the actor and the action. "I once saw a film showing two Eskimos on a boat in the Arctic carrying on a conversation with each other. The film was silent. . . . "
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