Word: couplets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Garbo loved. Helena Rubinstein is remembered for the beauty of her buttonholes, Clark Gable for the best eyelashes she ever saw. And if the tall stories about kings and playboys often ravel, the shrewdness and impersonal good humor of the storyteller are intact. Cole Porter, of course, wrote a couplet about Vreeland: "Here's Diana/ Sittin' on the piana." And that's where she has been, swinging her legs, for most of the century...
...couplet was taken from the "Macheth" couplet. "By the pricking of my thumbs Something wicked this way comes...
Tastes change; each era meets the classics on new ground. At the approach of the 18th century, John Dryden offered Virgil as a master of the heroic couplet: "Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate,/ And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate." During the Victorian era, Aeneas emerged in the English of William Morris and other writers as a Romantic brooder well versed in Wordsworth's Ode to Duty. Fitzgerald's version, a century hence, may seem equally dated. But if translations capture the essence of their culture, then this Aeneid, in its supple beauty...
...protests are aimed at the U.S., a group of Communist youths stopped last month outside the Soviet embassy in Rome to shout, "Comrade Brezhnev, cannons are useless, revolution is made by the masses!" Many of the placards at Rome's big Oct. 24 rally carried the rhyming couplet, Dalla Sicilia alia Scandinavia, no alia NATO e al patto di Varsavia (From Sicily to Scandinavia, no to NATO and the Warsaw Pact...
...sententious liberalism is undiminished; his antique Midwestern vocabulary ("hen fruit," "on the fritz") is intact; and if his optimism is a bit white at the temples, it still goads him on. But Reinhart ultimately comes to believe that life's meaning can be boiled down to the profound couplet: "Nothin' says lovin'/ Like something from the oven." The transformation has affected his creator as well. The tortuous and arcane language Berger displayed in Neighbors has been effectively streamlined. It now breaks for self-examination: "It was ridiculous that I lived almost half a century trying to measure...