Word: barrooms
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MIGUEL STREET, by V. S. Naipaul (222 pp.; Vanguard; $3.95), recalls the fact that, by some twist of mind or diet, the inhabitants of Trinidad speak English in a way that startles and delights the ear. They have this in common with nonprofessional speakers of Irish English (the barroom Irish of Manhattan's Third Avenue are tedious professionals) and with the talkers of Elizabethan England, if their playwrights bear true witness. In writing about such magnificent lingoists, color threatens to overwhelm shape, as it very nearly did in Naipaul's roguish first novel, The Mystic Masseur. In these...
...humor, and with considerably more conviction than most of his folk-styled competition. The numbers include On the 18th Day of November, The Captains and the Kings, I Am a Happy English Lad, rendered in a wildly improbable parody of an Oxford accent. Some of Behan's barroom sweepings are fresh as newsprint:I cried to Mr. Khrushchev, Please grant me this great boon: Don't muck about, don't muck about, Don't muck about with the moon...
...Wool Over His Eyes. In Rochester, N.Y., asked by Patrolman Joseph Verso why she was dangling a rope out of her window with a pair of white socks tied to the end of it, a housewife explained: "My husband spends all day in the barroom downstairs, and when I want him to come up, I dangle his socks in front of the barroom window...
Crocks of Granite. In Detroit, while fire blazed in the kitchen of Frank Collins' Bar, while the building filled with smoke, while firemen dragged hoses through the barroom and water sloshed on the floor, seven steady customers refused to budge from their bar stools...
Limbering Up. In Aosta, Italy, Salvatore Bracciorosso was arrested after using his wooden leg to fell several opponents in a barroom brawl...