What's a 4 letter word for blather?

I do a lot of crossword puzzles. Which means I am subjected to a lot of pun-ishment.

An example:


Gleeful seer - "happy medium"

There are certain words that routinely appear in crosswords:


Alum
Alee
Via
Ocher (and Ochre)
Atop
Riga
Brno
Lease
Let/relet/rent

And it seems that crossword puzzle authors collude. When you do more than one crossword puzzle in the same day, you may see the same words in each. Sometimes, you see a clue which part of a word pair and the left hand word is the answer in one puzzle while the right hand word is the answer in another. I always find this weird. I can't believe they call each other up or chat before creating the puzzles but I also don't think there's some kind of unintended telepathy going on either.


But it does make solving them easier.