Word: archaicism
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...Lucketts begin meeting people, and once life begins its shift from the hunter's to the farmer's economy, the story relaxes towards more ordinary folk-stuff. But Conrad Richter can teach most U. S. folk-writers a trick or two in the right use of archaic language, and his pioneers, unlike most in fiction, never preen themselves before posterity...
...centrals" are pals with their customers, keep them in touch with local gossip. Subscribers grouse at the service and complain that the *Of the rest, 79% are Bell, some 3% mutual system is so lackadaisical about repairs that they frequently have to make them themselves. No less archaic is the company's pole policy. When poles blow down or rot away, line men whack off the diseased portion, resink the stub into the ground. Result is that subscribers sometimes have to stoop to get under the wires...
Having firmly sketched his people in this first chapter, James Still tells of their japes and sorrows and near starvation, the rich archaic poetry of their talk and customs, in a clear, dry style as unsentimental as his seven-year-old's eyes. Before he is through with them-with Grandma, who at 78 still shucks her own corn; with Uncle Jolly, always laying up in jail awhile "or breaking ribs or taking direct action in affairs of property; with the neighbors, mean or kind, in mining camps and on hill farms-he has produced a work...
...these remarks may seem oldfashioned, but one of the concerns of Duncan Aikman is to show that they are typical, if extreme; that North Americans of branch office calibre are often content (and of course mutually encouraged) to behave like boors and babies in a society too proud, too archaic, too difficult for them to understand. Aikman finds that the universal South American deduction is that the Good Neighbor policy of Cordell Hull and Franklin Roosevelt will be ditched by the first Republican Administration to take office...
Copiously illustrated with archaic, mostly unheard-of local faces, published by a home press, dealing minutely with matters which once excited a town or county, at most, a State, these 500 pages might easily have been of an interest equally local. But they are, for those very reasons and some others, an almost incalculably rich and subtle portrait of the late igth Century South: as a State, as a people, as reflected in platoons of politicians, lobbyists, journalists, industrialists, preachers and educators; as pinned down in thousands upon thousands of facts of all sorts and sizes; as embodied in every...