Word: babel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Three broke vaudevillians decide to become tower builders in Babel. George (John Lithgow), May (Deborah May) and Jerry (Treat Williams) open an elocution school in Hollywood to prep silent stars for the talkies. Jerry riffles through people like a deck of cards, May has the patience of Florence Nightingale, and George is purer than the infancy of truth and madder than his true love (Julia Duffy). Through simple unpollutable honesty, George becomes chief of staff to a manic-depressive studio mogul, Herman Glogauer. George S. Irving plays this role as if he were a Yiddish Mussolini...
...object of the camera's attention soon moves to a close-up of ecstatic neophytes screaming to their follow trainees that "I am here because I want to change." This presumed act of self-confession is greeted by a babel of resonating applause and general whooping reminiscent of the narcotics-induced pandemonium of a rock concert. But these people do not get off on junk or ganja, they get off on quaintly named exercises like psychocalisthenics, karma processing and catharsis for the Acceptance of Change. As we are assured by our guide on this sojurn into Aricaland, "The same general...
...tongues of men have proliferated considerably since the Tower of Babel helped explain how the sons of Noah came to converse in so many different languages. Today there are 3,000 languages in the world, most of them oral only, which makes life difficult for Christian missionaries sworn to spread the word of God as widely as possible. Most Bible societies, in fact, concentrate mainly on getting adequate translations into the major written languages. But the Summer Institute of Linguistics has a longer reach. For the past 42 years, following the teachings of its founder W. Cameron Townsend, S.I.L. teams...
...blurred. In a section labeled "Gobbledygook," the newspaper offered a daily $10 prize for the worst phrase of the day. Sample from the U.S. Labor Department: "No lost time injuries that do not result in a medical expense should not be reported to the OWCP." Those who believe that Babel can be located somewhere south of Sacramento have derived aid and discomfort from Richard Rosen's new volume, Psychobabble. On the downhill arc of the Me Decade, Rosen split an infinitive and savages cant as he collects "psychological patter, whose concern is to faithfully catalogue...
...unit set can be a house or room or a neo-Bayreuthring that rotates on its axis to create changes of scene. The new Rigoletto (cost: close to $300,000, neither cheap nor extravagant) is built around a leaning tower that suggests not so much Pisa but Babel and, at times, the land of Hansel and Gretel. At the start it represents the palace of the Duke of Mantua. For the second scene it becomes the house where the jester Rigoletto has hidden, or so he thinks, his daughter Gilda from a menacing outside world. And so on. The tower...