Word: dialects
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...idea that led him to construct his first telescope. With the new instrument, which he called cannocchiale ("tubespec-tacles"), he was the first human being to see the satellites of Jupiter, the spots on the sun, the mountains of the moon. In Venice the splendid Doge (Venetian dialect for Duce) puffed up the steps of the Campanile of St. Mark's to take a telescopic gander, immediately doubled Galileo's annual stipend of 500 florins ($30,800 at the 1940 gold price...
Without any question, all matters of culture and mythology aside, these ancedotes make wonderful reading. The stories are bulging with humor, the dialect is fast moving and expressive, and the tall tales are fantastic and original. It has been held by some reviewers that the Almanacs, with all their humor, have not the literary quality ascribed to them by Howard M. Jones in his foreword to the book. Although the "lyric exuberance" of these stories might be doubted, what does seem undeniably present in these anecdotes is an outstanding amount of imagination and originality in the language and the situations...
...December 1938 meeting of the American Dialect Society in New York City, Alonzo Turner read a paper entitled "West African Survivals in the Vocabulary of Gullah." Gullah is the dialect spoken by a group of Negroes living in an isolated part of South Carolina. . . . According to Mr. Turner's studies, Gullah jook-house (phonetically, dzuk haus), meaning "a disorderly house, a house of ill repute," is related apparently to words in two West African languages. In Wolof, dzug or dzog means "to lead a disorderly life, to misconduct oneself." In Bambara, dzugu means "wicked...
...shilling and tuppence (27?) a head per week. In the sweating jungle Congo belles wheedled out of their bosses split piston rings for their noses, rivets for their ears. Duralumin rings for bracelets. Soon blacks and whites were so friendly that each Briton had a nickname in native dialect. Radioman James Wycherley was named "King of the white men" because he sat at his dials instead of working...
...half-caste cabarets and straw-thatched cinema palaces. And he listened long and often to the jungly songs of Brazil's Indians, the hot, oozing rhythms of Brazil's primitive Negroes. With these in his inner ear, he started to write music-unorthodox, a new musical dialect made from aboriginal shouts and strummings. The salons of Rio de Janeiro made faces at it, thought it barbaric. But the peões in the thatched huts...