Word: argot
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...fine art and popular culture over three-quarters of a century, from Cubism to the '80s. They set out to show how some "high" artists raided "low" (popular and mass) culture for their own purposes. Not all of them, needless to say, did. You won't find the visual argot of advertising, news photography, graffiti or comic strips in the work of the great Apollonians of the past hundred years, from Monet and Matisse to Richard Diebenkorn. But this vernacular, Gopnik and Varnedoe rightly argue, is essential to a grasp of Cubism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, Surrealism and their European offshoots...
...movie veers uneasily from not-funny comedy to not-persuasive melodrama. Murphy forgets that the dialogue in old- fashioned crime pictures was as highly stylized as the settings. In place of sharply polished wisecracks, he gives us the steady mutter of the witless, unfelt obscenities that are the argot of our modern mean streets...
...farmers who've come out to meet Willey are neither heretics nor hayseeds but businessmen in a carpeted irrigation-district boardroom. They hem and haw in their own argot. They are worried, for instance, about load-flow relationships: if the government sets stringent new standards on selenium in their runoff, they may need to dilute it with the very water Willey is proposing to buy. Life is terribly uncertain. The regulatory agencies, they observe, "just agreed that water runs downhill about two months ago." The farmers also have this uneasy feeling that the environmentalists want them to save water...
...nightmare world being enacted is not only ancient Greece but also the courtly France of 1667, where Jean Racine wrote his tragedy Andromaque, and the skinhead London of 1988, whose coarse argot has been chosen by Director Jonathan Miller to lend contemporary clout. The melange of cultures does not always work, although much else does in this hurtling two-hour, no- intermission staging. Yet Miller's production, which opened last week at London's Old Vic Theater, is an event of considerably broader consequence than a re-examination of an austere and little-produced play by one of the theater...
...News have enough acid wit to recall the sophisticated screwball comedies of the '30s, but their subject is greed, '80s style. Charlie Sheen and William Hurt play an avid stockbroker and a laid- back TV journalist who have nothing on their minds but headlong success. Listen to their gaudy argot ! Watch them in perpetual motion ! They' ll be back at Oscar time...