The word "gabfest" is correct and usable in written English.
It is an informal word meaning a conversation or discussion that is typically long and gossipy. Example sentence: The girls had a gabfest about their latest crushes.
Individually or collectively, they talk freely about their off-the-course lives and interests, inviting the public in for the gabfest.
Few Democrats even in South Carolina will bother to tune in to the dutiful TV stations that are running the 90-minute gabfest on May 3rd.
The event in Toronto this week was not a frontiersman's gathering, however, but the world's biggest mining gabfest.
But many delegates in Johannesburg say that this should be the last great UN gabfest on sustainable development.
AS WALTER RIESTER prepared to address this week's annual gabfest of IG Metall, Germany's and Europe's largest trade union, a senior union official approached the podium and handed him a pendant emblazoned with the union's logo.
And still the only thing Washington can talk about is the relationship between a politician and a Californian intern.Which would all be very amusing, in a "Groundhog Day" sort of way, if it were not for the fact that the intern at the heart of the current gabfest is probably dead and probably murdered.
But they hang around gabfests to pick up ideas, not to win contracts.
Bill Gates attracted far more attention at economic gabfests than a mere head of state.On closer inspection, however, anti-corporate feeling was rife.
Anyway, executives clearly have enough time on their hands to attend gabfests such as Davos, where they do little more than recycle corporate clichés about "stakeholders" and "sustainability".
But that pattern raises the larger questions of whether what any of the current crop of candidates is saying counts, and how much this entire series of G.O.P. gabfests matters.
The novel's pointillist depictions of small-town rituals can drag at times (fewer gabfests at the Come 'n' Eat and discussions of zoning ordinances might have been welcome).
