Now it is the tap-tap on a computer by journalists; then, it was the chunk-chunk of an I.B.M. Selectric by a professor.
Though even today there are some things that are as close to eternal as a town built on roulette wheels could hope for: the airport still has slot machines; the casinos still play a repetitive, purling tinkle, kind of like Philip Glass on a hurdy-gurdy but punctuated now and then by the chunk-chunk-chunk of coins bouncing out of the slots.
The scene in which the liner puts out to sea, the stokers filling the boilers, the steam gauges rising, the chunk-chunk of the turbines gathering speed as the pistons thrust up and down — culminating in an underwater shot of the triple propellers starting to churn the water — sets up what you could call "the mechanical tragedy".
The hangmen's black ski masks, the jeers, the jostling in the dark, the shouts of "God damn you," the chanted prayer cut short by the sudden chunk-chunk of the trapdoor and the violent interruption of the prisoner's free fall, the display of the glassy-eyed corpse — the brutal spectacle bore an irresistible resemblance to a video from some terrorist Web site.
These words made people smile, and so they would come to me, asking for chunks, chunks, chunks.
Nobody really knows what to call it; according to the New York Times, imperfect approximations include the "chunk-chunk" and the "dun-dun".
Then, shamelessly, they devoured it, wolfing down chunk after chunk.
Don't chunk it," and promptly chunked it, 30 feet short.
"The devil is in how big a chunk is that big chunk," he said.
