the.com/chatterbox
A person who treats silence as an emergency requiring immediate verbal intervention.
means A person who talks constantly, often about trivial things.
from A straightforward 19th-century compound: 'chatter' (rapid, trivial talk, itself echoing the sound of quick chirping or jabbering since medieval times) plus 'box,' here used the way it is in words like 'jukebox' — a container or source of the thing named. So a chatterbox is literally imagined as a box that dispenses chatter, as if someone flipped a switch and it wouldn't stop running.
- origin era
- coined 1770s, predates telephones by a century
- literal build
- chatter plus box, mouth as container
- typical irony
- often knows the least, says the most
- universal trait
- every language has its own version of this word