Russians pick the conversation topic beforehand and rate their chat straight afterwards.
You can ask a question for an answer, and follow up with multiple questions, with Google picking the conversation out and returning the right answer.
Whenever one groped for a word or expression, the other would pick the conversation up seamlessly to refine the point; when they made eye contact, it was clear that something invisible and understood was passing between them.
Even if this is only a short conversation a week or so, it is very important to keep up the conversation; once you stop talking to someone for a long period of time, it becomes a lot harder to pick the conversation back up later, and in the long run will be not doing yourself any favors.
If you picked the horse, the conversation would end.
"The reporter who picked up the conversation between eBay and Yahoo had a good piece of news," Mr. Steiger said.
When Ravi picked up the conversation with Tam the next afternoon, he said, "I still don't really care, except what my parents are going to say.
When her mother, Linda, 49, slid into the chair for bonding on her front teeth, he easily picked up the conversation from a previous visit.
Mr. Pataki has picked up the conversation where Mr. Giuliani left off, saying that developers should never build on the footprints of the twin towers.
After a while, though, the boy picked up the conversation, slipping casually into the kind of slow-moving, pointless talk that goes on between people of good will who don't know each other well: stuff about football — I was surprised by that, though I suppose I shouldn't have been — and some documentary he'd seen on television.
