Word: dictions
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...awful. Altogether too much of the play's rich, multi-textured language was muffled or lost to echoes--shouting lines didn't help audibility. To the actors' great credit, though, this is one of the very few Shakespeare productions in recent memory in which nobody had trouble with their diction: most of these guys knew how to speak Shakespeare as if they understood it, and could make us understand...
...than Mount, had managed to do it without bathos. Benjamin West, the prodigy from Philadelphia, had brought it off--but by going to London and soaking himself in its prototypes. In America would-be artists had to rely on an erratic supply of prints for their clues to elevated diction, but there was hardly any local market for history painting. John Trumbull, president of the American Academy of Fine Arts, whose lifelong ambition was to commemorate the American Revolution in paint on an official scale, died a bitterly disappointed...
...recently listened to a marathon session of Sinatra's recordings. It was a revelation: hundreds of songs seemed to belong only to him. His diction was crystal clear, no slurring, no swallowing of words. His singing was pure, no pyrotechnics. The focus was on the words. But what really set Sinatra apart was his ability to inhabit a song. When Frank Sinatra sang, you felt he had lived what he was telling you. No other artist so disappears into the lyrics. DIANE DANIELLE Berkeley, Calif...
Mamet's fictive world was distinctive from the get-go. His plays, beginning with the 1974 Sexual Perversity in Chicago, wrapped Pinteresque menace in comically precise diction, like a gamier Damon Runyon. It was Jewish guys talking like Italian guys about life, death and, always, a poignant memory of the perfect woman, long ago or never. ("Bobby," says the dying cop in Homicide, "you remember that girl that time?") But at 50, Mamet has other concerns. The overtly serious work tends to be about Jewishness (in his play The Old Neighborhood and novel The Old Religion); the nastily comic, about...
Kohl's most endearing trait is his straight-forward, bluntly honest voice--one might surmise that after thirty years experience with school-age children, the author's gift for clearing out needless discourse has been honed to a razor's edge. Simple diction, while vital for pedantry, has its drawbacks in the modern non-fiction market: every once in a while Kohl's hand can be felt patting the reader on the head, as if recruiting another kindergartner into his throngs of supporters. This is not to say that condescension (if it can be called such) is not totally displeasing...