The professional conversationalist — "I just finished jew’s-ear. I’m just…"
‘I just finished jew’s-ear. I’m just starting on jew’s-harp and the general theory of oral lyres. I’ve never even skied.’
Context
Answer to a paranoid question about alpenstock murders: Hal gives his coordinates in the dictionary, the only progress report that means anything to him — jew's-ear done, jew's-harp begun. He's serious enough about it to have bartered a month of lawn-mowing for an interview with an "oral-lyrologist" later that afternoon (p. 31). The purest specimen of the boy as O.E.D.-machine.