Word: dialectics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There were prayer sessions from which rose chants of Sanskrit verses. Then the blue lights in the meditation hall dimmed, and the faithful swayed rhythmically to and fro. Finally, Muktananda proclaimed (in Mindi, a Hindi dialect), "Now is the auspicious hour of the auspicious day. The sun and moon are strong." That heralded the main event: the marriage of 16 couples, the women in saris, with garlands of flowers. The guru, who is licensed to perform weddings as a minister in an ordination mill called the Universal Life Church, blessed the rings and said, "May you live together in love...
Very little is pretty about Soweto, not even the name (which rhymes with potato). It derives from no tribal dialect but from "southwestern township," its location, eight miles southwest of the larger white city. Soweto is actually a black bedroom community for Johannesburg. Most of the adults commute daily aboard crowded, segregated trains to jobs in the city. Few whites return the visits. To enter Soweto, a white person must obtain a special permit good only for daylight hours, a day at a time...
...size (181,000 sq. mi.) and population (almost 3 million), Papua New Guinea is roughly equivalent to New Zealand, but there the resemblance ends. The population is scattered among more than 700 tribes, each of which has its own dialect. Most of the people hack out meager livings as subsistence-level farmers in remote rural areas. The country has no railroads and few paved roads, relying for transportation on bush pilots and 476 air strips...
Dramatically, Treemonisha calls for a certain amount of forebearance. Its message (improving the lot of the Negro) is treated naively, and its solution (education) is somewhat simplistic. Treemonisha works for an audience of today because Joplin kept his touch light despite heavy use of dialect ("No, dat bag you'se not gwine to buy, 'cause I know de price is high"). His is a fable that James Thurber might have appreciated...
...professor of English at Temple University, writes vehemently: "To the extent that the establishment depends on the inarticulacy of the governed, good writing is inherently subversive ... Black English, the shuffling speech of slavery, serves the purposes of white racism." Of course, there is angry argument over whether black dialect is "the shuffling speech of slavery...