Word: dialectical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Baldwin Bergersen; produced by George Stanton) is an all-Negro folk-fandango laid in the West Indies. A "musical play," Carib Song unfolds a triangle story so lethargic and sedate that it virtually libels the reputation of the tropics. The love story, moreover, is pretty much buried in native dialect (e.g., "I ain't know") and local customs, ranging from God-fearing church-going to god-fearing voodoo. All this is now & again picturesque but never dramatic. Carib Song owes its best moments to the dancing of Katherine Dunham-the show's choreographer as well as star...
...brashest, bounciest lexicographer who ever lived is a Baltimorean of German extraction named Henry Louis Mencken. His first, famed dictionary (The American Language, 1919) was dedicated to the proposition that English has now become only a dialect of American...
...American Language, soon discovered that his mass of new material had outgrown the parent volume. Many of Supplement I's 739 pages are devoted simply to supporting the thesis of The American Language, i.e., U.S. speech-ways have grown so powerful that they are rapidly reducing to a dialect "the ancient and lovely but now somewhat rheumy language of the British Isles." Readers of the Supplement will find it packed with boisterous Menckenian humor and casual erudition...
...speed of a Stakhanovite amoeba, neat and artificial as a nest of concentric Chinese boxes, this hypersymmetrical rake's progress is as stylized in its performance as in its structure. It is more like a puppet show than a flesh & blood comedy, and its dialogue is in dialect as formal as the colloquy of Mandarins. The puppets often strike tableaux which have charm, irony and even beauty, of a kind. But it is a kind so rigid and remote from simple human warmth that honest laughs come few & far between. It is an unusual, skilful and singularly lifeless little...
...stories are written in a jarring blend of phonetic dialect ("Shuddap, you bassars or I'll trun the lot of you out") and literary flourishes ("She saw in the bough of the child the tree of the man"). As explained by Brown, the accent contains "the ghosts of several dialects common to soldiers . . . [but] is certainly not Brooklynese...