Friendly noises came from the State Department's Colin Powell.
While making friendly noises to Vojislav Kostunica, the winner of the presidential election on September 24th, it has not publicly declared Mr Milosevic the loser.
"Their antics are very amusing, and when I come out in the yard, they come running up to me, clucking away and making all sorts of friendly noises".
Sir Terry is less clear: he's a major architect and master-planner, but makes friendly noises about incremental improvements to high streets and neighbourhoods.
Asked about sensitive issues, from Scotland's future currency to the fate of Britain's nuclear deterrent (currently based in Scotland), he combined soothing, friendly noises with a continuous, relentless flow of facts, figures and debating points.
Still, in an effort to change his (and Romania's) reputation for command-style economics, Mr Iliescu is making friendly noises to the IMF and the World Bank.The immediate problem is to cope with the winter.
And whilst Mr Bush has pushed his party towards the centre, Mr Gore ran much further left than he needed to (and thus, incidentally, managed to botch an election that, by most conventional yardsticks, he should have won comfortably).In either case, the winner will probably have to do more than make friendly noises towards the opposition.
Mr Bush made friendly noises but no firm promise to lift the ban on Canadian beef (pointedly served to him at a summit dinner) which has lost ranchers over $4 billion in exports since one single cow was found to have mad-cow disease 18 months ago.
Another is Jean-Francois Lisée, the former Minister for Montreal, an ex-journalist who is fluently bilingual, makes friendly noises towards the province's Anglophones (he told me once that they are a "distinct society" in Quebec, which is a loaded term in these parts) and is a hard-core sovereignist.
