Word: cockneyism
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...natives proudly call themselves, are not of Spanish ancestry but are descended from the Jewish, Maltese, Genoese and Moroccan immigrants whom the British encouraged to settle there. A tough, cocky breed, the citizens of Britain's only European crown colony speak breakneck English and a kind of cockney Spanish, follow British soccer as avidly as the bullfights, and pride themselves on their stiff upper lips, the view from their 1,400-ft.-high peak (Africa is only 20 miles across the straits), and the fact that the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Britain's Prime Minister...
...better, Disney employs all the vast magicmaking machinery at his command. The sets are luxuriant, the songs lilting, the scenario witty but impeccably sentimental, and the supporting cast only a pinfeather short of perfection. Protean Dick Van Dyke is uneasy with his accent but nonetheless nimble as Bert, the cockney chimney sweep, whether hoofing it with a quartet of penguins or leading the sooty male chorus in a raffish rooftop ballet. Ed Wynn, as the risible Uncle Albert, floats upward every time he laughs, and soon has everyone aloft for the movie's most engaging scene, a high high...
Elizabeth read that one in a very accomplished cockney accent and showed herself to be more of an actress than I thought she was. She read William Butler Yeats's Three Bushes, about two women who loved the same man, and really belted out the line, "What could I do but drop down dead if I lost my chastity?" All evening, as she read, Richard's foster father sat behind her mouthing every word she said. He was just afraid she would make a mistake, but he looked like a ventriloquist...
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: SYMPHONY NO. 2 (Sir John Barbirolli conducting the Halle Orchestra; Everyman). Sir John, maestro of both the Houston Symphony and the Halle of Manchester, gives a glowing performance of the too-little-heard impressionistic symphony called "The London." Here are pomp and pageantry, cockney airs, the chimes of Big Ben, and a luminous lento movement that the composer called "Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon." The music also evokes an era; it was completed...
...awkwardly. But neither mood overpowers the other, and the pulse of Pinter's story never misses a beat. Dustin Hoffman and Paul Benedict are well-matched as the brains-and-lummox partners; only Hoffman's antics occasionally smack of Kellogg's Cornflakes, and he tends to mix up his Cockney with Brooklynese...