Word: dialectical
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...listened. Worse, he was never examined by anyone who could speak Chinese. Nearly three decades went by before anyone even tried to understand. In 1978, a social worker at a mental hospital in Manteno, Ill., took Tom to a Chinese restaurant, where he had a conversation in Cantonese dialect with the cook. There was nothing wrong with Tom, the cook told the hospital staff, setting in motion a four-year battle in the state courts to win his release. Tom's long nightmare had begun when, suffering from tuberculosis, he was admitted to a sanatorium. Because what he said...
...been visualizing you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit." The alternative method promises treachery: "When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning...
...Russian Ambassador was served bird's-nest soup and Peking duck, while the Americans got borsch and blinis. He refused to flirt with their wives. With the British Ambassador he would pretend to be a hick just down from the villages, and speak only in an obscure regional dialect; in the case of the United States, however, he took the opposite tack and addressed their legate in incomprehensibly florid French. Embassies would constantly be subjected to power cuts. Isky would open their diplomatic bags and personally add outrageous remarks to the Ambassadors' reports...
...Franklin and John C. Calhoun. Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, endorsed their honesty; Leah Fish, an enterprising promoter, moved them from parlors to crowded lecture halls. By 1860, twelve years after the first triumph of the little Foxes, Humorist Artemus Ward wrote in his patented regional dialect, "My naburs is mourn harf crazy on the new fangled idear about Sperrets...
...straight. I don't think that the expression has anything to do with saliva. It originated, I believe, among the darkies of the South and the correct phrasing-without dialect-is "spirit and image." It was originally used in speaking of someone whose father had passed on-and the colored folks would say-"the very spi't an' image of his daddy...