Word: babeling
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...immigrant stars filled important character niches. The Latin lover: Rudolph Valentino (Italy); the noble warlord: Sessue Hayakawa (Japan); the tragic heroine: Pola Negri (Poland); the vamp goddess: Greta Garbo (Sweden). Nor was the flood stanched with the arrival of talking pictures in the late 1920s. Hollywood saw the Babel of exotic accents as one more earnest of its cosmopolitan reach. And so Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer brought their suavity from France; Marlene Dietrich (Germany), Hedy Lamarr (Austria) and Ingrid Bergman (Sweden) helped Garbo flesh out the fantasy of the European woman. From south of the border Carmen Miranda brought...
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew...
That may be true for almost the first time since 1948, when the new nation of Israel suddenly became a Babel-like meeting place for Jews from about 100 countries speaking 70 languages. Religious-minded and often untrained, the newly arrived Sephardic immigrants (including 260,000 from Morocco, 120,000 from Iraq and 50,000 from Yemen between 1948 and 1958) found that their new home had been built on the principles of secular Zionism. Israel's schools, its bureaucracy, its kibbutzim had all been set in place by Europeans...
...rapidly. Readers in 1923 had never heard a movie actor talk, never imagined a television screen. Technology kept bringing new transformations: long-playing records, high-speed cameras, videotape equipment. Not only arts changed but audiences as well. Local orchestras, opera, ballet and theater companies proliferated. So did the electronic babel (sitcom disc-jockey disco-rock singing commercial) that now seems an inescapable fact of life. In the age of the mass audience, more people could watch a Shakespeare play on TV than had ever seen it in all previous performances; more still watch network fare like Three's Company...
...nations are melted into a new race of men." Americans embittered by the wars of Europe knew that fusing diversity into unity was more than a poetic ideal, it was a practical necessity. In 1820 future Congressman Edward Everett warned, "From the days of the Tower of Babel, confusion of tongues has ever been one of the most active causes of political misunderstanding...