Word: dialection
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This home truth explains a great deal that seems merely shabby, not monstrous, and not puzzling enough to require three wagonloads of explication. The author may have been right, incidentally, not to present this rough man's thoughts in rough dialect. For long paragraphs, however, the words that come out of Watson's mouth are, somewhat jarringly, the worthy, scholarly, perceptive, always interesting, late 20th century observations of Peter Matthiessen. About his quirky trilogy a reader might conclude: brilliant, obsessive, panoramic--and two novels too many...
...from the chaos of dialect, of ignorance and of setting emerges the poignant symmetry of a love triangle. In seventeen short scenes, these three characters play out their strange and beautiful love affairs unselfconsciously and without histrionics. The self-assured and bombastic Henry's awkward gift of a lipstick is completely believable, and Mae kissing Henry's mind is the most romantic moment I've encountered all semester...
...first Jack seems a bit trite because of his fabled old Western dialect of cute truisms and botched verbs, his "aw-shucks" likeability and his emphasis on his honest-to-God credibility. I was a bit critical about what might have been merely a tall-tale spun by a clever snake oil salesman, posing as a nice guy who had many incredible experiences. But the more I read, the more I was convinced of his absolute sincerity because of how human and tangible a character he really is. I thought I was listening to a storyteller speak rather than reading...
...which allows the narrator-heroine to endure the trials that occasionally strike the reader dumb with incredulity. Despite a few rough edges, the book manages to involve readers deeply in the emotional current of the story. While the novel falls down occasionally in the use of an inner-city dialect which author Connie Porter has trouble translating into text, the skilled use of deliberately, nakedly inelegant language and expressive imagery fills readers with the lyric of her tale and almost unwittingly immerses us in the complexities of Tasha's emotional life...
Likewise another trend: our growing tendency to talk and think in the bulky, arcane dialect of the law. A doctor I know has noticed, for example, that when she asks a new patient, "Do you have any allergies?" she frequently gets the response, "Not to the best of my knowledge." I suspect this is a kind of folk formality: people think the legalistic phrasing drapes their talk in a cape of gravity. And in the past year references to "perjury," "suborning of perjury," "lying under oath" and "obstruction of justice" have entered our conversations as if we were all first...