Word: dictional
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...freshman, I barely squeaked into Theodore Morrison's English Fa, in spite of, rather than because of, my opus. From Professor Morrison I learned about structure and diction, how to rhyme, how to write blank verse, what fourteeners are: the real stuff of verse composition. I learned how to confine myself to form, how to think thoughts of ten beats. I could scan anything, I learned by examples what poetry really was: the structured, symbolic expression of certain ideals, especially the Good and the Beautiful...
...Catullus. I read Robert Lowell and L. E. Sissman (I wasn't proud), and walked around feeling, and wondering when I'd first win the National Book Award. I began to sound like Lowell, too. Not that I could write the way he could: but I absorbed his diction the way I absorbed the rest of Harvard. And along with his speech. I began to mimic Lowell's aimless guilt and sense of inadequacy; I became tortured, at eighteen. I wanted to check into McLean. I didn't know why any more than I knew what Robert Lowell was talking...
Whitman viewed the spoken idiom of Negro Americans as a source for a native grand opera. Its flexibility, its musicality, its rhythms, freewheeling diction and metaphors, as projected in Negro American folklore, were absorbed by the creators of our great 19th century literature even when the majority of blacks were still enslaved. Mark Twain celebrated it in the prose of Huckleberry Finn; without the presence of blacks, the book could not have been written. No Huck and Jim, no American novel as we know it. For not only is the black man a co-creator of the language that Mark...
...similarity between the middle-aged child of the book and the Sir Guy Grand that Southern brings to the screen is purely coincidental. Sir Guy, an erudite industrial magnate with Oxford diction and an aristocrat's locked jaw, gets his slightly malicious kicks by showing, over and over again, that men chase money. In one of the very first scenes, Sir Guy gives a traffic bobby 500 pounds for eating the parking ticket so that he can smugly pronounce that "every man has his price." The rest of the movie consists of various anecdotal restatements of that same theme until...
...consciousness of "something infinitely fragile and viable in the System, in its accommodations with radicals, rednecks, soldiers, blacks, thinkers, visionaries, lunatics, the ordinary." Unhappily, Toward a Radical Middle ends before the '60s do; there are many events that go without Adler's precise vision and formidable diction. They may be forthcoming. After a stretch as the New York Times film critic-a period she justifiably describes as "a year in the dark"-she resigned "to do occasional articles." It is to be hoped that the occasions will occur frequently. There is a vast no man's land...