Word: dictional
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Peasant Formula. Russian tales in the oral tradition have a distinctive diction, which is here brilliantly rendered by the translator, Norbert Guterman. This involves such conventions as repetition and introductory and concluding flourishes. The traditional "and they lived happily ever after" may be replaced by the more homely peasant formula, "They celebrated their wedding, and are still alive to this very day and chewing bread." Many stories end with a hint by the storyteller that he is hungry and thirsty after his labors. "There's a tale for you and a crock of butter...
...words at the listener, each elegantly rounded vowel like a trajectory for a gunshot-sharp consonant. Just as she tried in her poetry to use her craft and skill to "manipulate intense personal experience"--as she says in an interview included on the record--so she uses impeccable diction to give a defining framework to the raw, brute emotion in her voice...
...ideas with importance. Discussing his institution's money troubles, a university president promises: "We will divert the force of this fiscal stress into leverage energy and pry important budgetary considerations and control out of our fiscal and administrative procedures." This is a W.C. Fields newspeak, the earnestly pseudoprecise diction beloved of bureaucrats, who imagine that its blind impregnability will give their ideas some authoritative heft. In fact, it only confirms the Confucian maxim: "If language is incorrect, then what is said is not meant. If what is said is not meant, then what ought to be done remains undone...
...Florizel, Polixenes's teenage son and suitor of Perdita, Richard Backus is an attractive chap. But he is not at ease with classical poetic diction. One is constantly aware of listening to an actor mouthing lines rather than a person voicing thoughts...
...anyway. That seems to be more a problem of bad interpretation than anything else. At last week's Das Rheingold in Seattle, recognizable English phrases-"Help me, sister" (Freia), "Back to the mines" (Alberich), "What, yield my ring?" (Wotan) -were few and far between. But by Die Walkure, diction and audience comprehension had picked up considerably. How does the composer himself feel? Almost everyone who has ever gone on record about the matter, including Wagner, Verdi and Puccini, speaks desperately of his desire to have his words understood, in whatever language...