Word: dictional
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...think of me sometimes" and warns him to "think of me sometimes" and warns him to "advance at your peril," are especially fine. But Gustafson's talents are most in evidence when she launches into song. Her strong, pure soprano elevates Patience's plight to operatic heights, her superb diction rarely obscuring Gilbert's lyrics...
That A Place to Come To works as well as it does is largely due to Warren's poetic mastery of language. While his diction is less lush than Faulkner's his syntax less consistently run-on, he possesses a marked gift for penning phrases laden with metaphorical richness. His characters struggle to evade the "doomful tangle of time" and watch music flowing over faces like "the flow of fate as it returned upon itself." In winding torrents of words, they unthread the skein of illusions cloaking their lives, acknowledging its demise in cold, sudden, one-sentence paragraphs. Tone, metaphor...
...directors clearly stressed diction, for the actors speak with great precision, making this easier to understand than most undergraduate productions of Shakespeare. But Monica Bachner as Hippolyta is too mechanical in her delivery, sacrificing inflection for clarity. Tim Sellars plays Hermia's lover Lysander well, but is handicapped by his boyish cuteness. Sellars looks too much the blonde California surfer. He delivers his lines with feeling, but we can't help thinking that if Hermia threw him over, he'd just as soon hop into his dune buggy and cruise down the beach until he found a new place where...
Steinbeck has no trouble speaking in any of his voices. He can make medieval diction comprehensible yet not catchy: Arthur charges to a knight's rescue and offers: "My old friend, it seems to me that you could use a horse. Please use this one." This is characterization of great subtlety, extracting Malory's essence and couching it in terms that are not fixed by time or place. Steinbeck's descriptions can reach the same crystal perfection; a day painted as "dream-darkened" is captured in one adjective...
...that: "all seems spun in webs of fragile silver," and on and on. Lovers and Tyrants is relentlessly overwritten; Gray leaves no noun unmodified in her search to recapture the past. She never settles for one evocative detail when a page-long list of sensations will do. Her diction is inexact ("voluminous" eyeglasses?) as is the overall effect of her prose...