Word: diphthongizing
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There is oleaginous Alexander Woollcott, larding it over Broadway in the person of Jock Livingston-without any sense of what made Woollcott the most powerful critic of his time. There is Noel Coward, every precious diphthong faultlessly mimicked by Daniel Massey -with only the barest dash of the saline wit that has kept him quoted for almost 50 years. And there is Gertrude Lawrence, played by Julie Andrews. Visually, Julie has vanished into the part. The pert little nose has been thickened, the hairline lowered, the eyebrows thinned, the mouth made severe and straight. It is only the emotional makeup...
Americans, who are less troubled by this particular kind of snobbery, may wonder what it is all about. But Author Llewellyn has lived on both sides of the diphthong curtain (he has been both an enlisted man and a captain in the Welsh Guards), and he plays this theme until a sense of caste becomes a vein of madness as authentic as Othello's jealousy...
...With a Diphthong in Kenya...
When Poet George William Russell was a young man in Victorian Dublin, he wrote a philosophic article under the pseudonym "Æon." The printer mangled it, and Æon came out Æ. For the rest of his life, Russell wrote under that diphthong. Outdistanced as a poet by such contemporaries as Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats, Æ culled through his verses not long before his death (in 1935) and selected 124 that he hoped he might be remembered for. Last week his Selected Poems achieved the semiclassic permanence of republication in the Golden Treasury Series (Macmillan; $1.25), along with...
...signed his first literary composition '-'Aeon." The printer could not read his handwriting, set up only the initial diphthong. The error pleased the author, who signed his subsequent work thus...