talk [ME] Talk is from the same root as tale [OE] and *tell. A person who talks incessantly is sometimes said to be able to talk the hind leg off a donkey. Versions of this expression go back to the early 19th century but the animal may vary—Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register for 1808 has ‘talking a horse’s hind leg off’. Another way of saying that someone chatters constantly is to accuse them of talking nineteen to the dozen. Presumably the idea is that the person is talking so quickly that they get in 19 words in the time it would take someone else to say a dozen. Nobody seems to know why 19 is the traditional number here, but the phrase has been in this form ever since it was first written down in the late 18th century. The term talking head for a television reporter who is viewed in close-up addressing the camera, is first recorded in the 1960s in the USA. Also American, also from the 1960s, is talk show, a programme in which the presenter talks informally to celebrities.