Word: dictional
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...exercise and develop their own literary talents. But the issue is not simply one of academic freedom. I question the validity of distinctions between the skills taught in craft of fiction the modes of expression are more open, if often less direct. Still, clarity is respected, compression admired, diction honored. If the implication of Richard Marius' decision is that style can't be adequately learned in the practice of fiction writing. I am sure even Strunk and White would disagree with...
...project this enormous is a milestone, to be sure, but it doesn't accomplish its aim; you can't understand the words without the libretto, translation or no translation. Whether it is the over-resonant, mediocre engineering of the recording, the imperfect diction of some of the singers, or simply the nature of operatic singing that is responsible, the words are three-quarters unintelligible. Porter's skillful imitation of Wagner's alliterative verse style never has a chance. The translation works best in the long narratives, during which the characters stop to repeat parts of the story in new musical...
...world's major opera houses, but this recording shows them in a very bad light. Rita Hunter's light-voiced Brunnhilde and Alberto Remedios' Siegfried are effective in the more lyrical passages, but neither really withstands the strain of these most taxing of roles. Hunter turns shrill and Remedios' diction decays. Much of the supporting cast has the same trouble, or others...
...work whole: the man, with his crankiness, suspicions and abundant neuroses, his unassuageable sense of not belonging, his self-pity and his addiction to booze and pills, is veiled behind the ceremonial diction of the catalogue?as he would have wished, perhaps. It is a moving exhibition, and not the least moving thing about it is its sense of failure. Rothko set himself goals which he could not meet, and he made demands on his art which no younger painters wanted to take up in emulation...
...pseudo-Arthurian landscape, and the clash of styles has the discordant ring of crossed lances at a joust. His heroes talk obsessively of "paps" and "mammets" (not, as Berger supposes, a variant of mammaries, but a medieval reference to Muhammad). The labored effort to reproduce Malory's diction is a disaster. Horses are "sore thirsty," kings are "some vexed," lusty knights "swyve" damsels, addressed elsewhere as "chicks." Launcelot is said to have "filled a need for the queen," a disheartening summation of one of the world's most fabled love affairs...