Word: babel
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...William Gaddis. In his first novel since The Recognitions (1955), the author chronicles the improbable fortunes of an eleven-year-old tycoon and takes a gargantuan swipe at contemporary skyscrapers of Babel...
Works by other writers in the past few months have reflected this fascination with language, but have delved deeper into the mysterious origins of words. In After Babel, Critic George Sterner uses the problems of translation to discuss the diversity human tongues and the linguistic theories that account for them. (Unlike many of the critics, he finds American English now in a state of acquisitive brilliance but also of instability ") Novelist Walker Percy, in a book of essays called The Message in the Bottle, splendidly analyzes the sheer strangeness of language as a phenomenon-an exchange of mental fire that...
...objections to opera, including Wagner, in English are formidable but not necessarily insurmountable. From the practical point of view, there is the problem of the babel of accents in the international casts that might be found at, say, the Met. Probably the inanities and repetitions found in most operas would be unacceptable in English for pragmatic American audiences. Anyone seriously following the plot might walk out on il Trovatore...
...Tortuga therefore sets sail with a babel of unattributed dialogue swimming in blinding expanses of white space. Pages go by bearing single words: "Polaris," "horizon." Taken singly, these pages seem too easy, too close to the work of lazy poets who write a word like "loneliness" in the middle of a blank piece of paper and call it an insight...
...Tower of-Babel Theory, "Some of the board meetings are incredibly ugly," says publisher Robert Rotner, "but just the fact that they can get that way is a good sign." People can vell at the editor and publisher, he says: "Most companies don't allow that...