Word: dictional
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Even Americans, if thoughtful, will realize that a hybrid, even as American culture is hybrid, he caught the vigor and rude strength of life in newly settled California. His clear, pointed style has swept the ceremonious diction of the Victorian writers from American fiction; and above all, he express that gaiety and resilience which are the distinguishing American characteristics. Bret Harte is the prophet of humor and humanity, but like most prophets he is honored everywhere but in his own land...
...Story. At the age of 18, Otis A. Skinner broached his plans for a stage career to his conservative clergyman father and his artistic mother. They laughed heartily. They could not foresee this awkward youth of bad diction and poor carriage as anything but ludicrous behind the footlights' all-revealing glare. Nevertheless, young Otis was sent to a friend of the family, who gave the youth a noncommittal letter, running as follows...
...experiments in diction and in metaphor seek the sharply out effects which are the glory of the Imagists,--and frequently attain them. Lowell writes of the advantage which the early risers of literature have over us moderns in gathering words while the dew is still fresh on them. When a word which once had a single exact meaning has been worked to nervous prostration what can we do but invent either a new word or a new use of an old one? When the best metaphors have become an old story, what can we do but bring together in fresh...
...story* of boxing from the days when fight training consisted of "three doses of salts, three sweats, three vomits, for three weeks, with food three-parts dressed," to the elaborate training camps of today. Strangely enough, the book is written with the sanity, the interest and the respectability of diction that is supposed to belong to literature...
Gypsy Jim. The dulcet diction of Leo Carrillo romantically implores his audience to have faith, that it may automatically acquire fortune. Mr. Carillo plays a genial young millionaire whose fancy is best pleased by wandering about the world disguised as a gypsy and doing good. He appears in a high yellow make-up and exotic attire. His peregrinations lead him to the threshold of a home heavy with failure. The father is a lawyer with no clamor of clients at his doorstep; the daughter, an authoress of many manuscripts but no publisher; the mother, steeped in sorrow for a buried...