Word: dialectical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...play is a pleasant little trifle, dealing easily with the simple lives of the farm folk of Devonshire, to whom habit complexes and six expressions are charmingly unknown. The difficulty of finding enough American actors and actresses qualified to handle the Devonshire dialect, even with modifications, is evident in spots throughout the performance, but in general the acting of the cast is finished and convincing. Walter Edwin, as "Churdles Ash", the hired man, is particularly to be praised, even though Mr. Phillpotts has cast his character in a form which makes it impossible for him to converse save in epigrams...
...outside subscription. As to library and laboratory, their liberality knows no bound short of an unbalanced budget. Undergraduates are trained to the manipulation of microscope and dissecting knife. Doctorates in philosophy are awarded for theses on the digamma in Anglo-Saxon or on the iota subscript in Greek dialect. But if young men and women are bent upon analyzing the life about them, on assembling the results of their observation in dramatic character, upon organizing it in dramatic action illumined by the accent and vernacular of today, they and the teacher who abets them are suspect. So-called English composition...
...woman named Glava rides a carrot-colored horse whose tail sweeps the ground.... She does much climbing of mountains, dresses in white robes, carries a spear, has her hair in two long braids. The horse is a 'grand creature'; so is Glava, and her nurse talks in an Irish dialect." It sounds a thoroughly bad book, yet she counsels people to read...
...thirsty. Take it as a peace offering and an evidence from Boston, and its City Hall that Harvard still holds a high place in its esteem and respect, and a sporadic case of bad manners is not the standard of Harvard conduct. Even the ghastly humor, and tragic dialect of the Lampoon will not wring our winners or change our views...
...dialogue is, of course, all mountain dialect, collected by the author at great pains. This dialect is in Mr. Mackaye's words "a noble illiteracy," a language "more flexible than that of the average university graduate," showing "richness of thought and imagination." It is native speech "undiluted by the Ink of the academic or journalistic." Clearly a language meant to be spoken, not printed, and this makes it very difficult for the reader of the printed version to enter into the spirit of either language or play...