Word: drawls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Tropic Thunder stars seem rich at first, but they don't grow; they grow repetitious. Lazarus is a mix of Russell Crowe, Daniel Day-Lewis and Robert De Niro in his body-punishing Raging Bull days, and Downey brings a nice pomposity to his blackface posturing and righteous-pimp drawl. (The joke, by the way, is clearly not on African Americans; it's on the actor's belief that he can play anyone.) But Lazarus and the others out there in the jungle don't evolve or devolve; they are figures from an SNL skit or the director...
...demanding to know what should be done. ''It's always a little off-putting to get slammed up against the wall at 7:30 in the morning,'' says an admiring Richard Murphy, who worked with Oakley during the Reagan Administration. Oakley's penchant for stating, in his soft Louisiana drawl, exactly what he thinks can get him into trouble. As Ambassador to Zaire, he was nearly kicked out of the country when his unvarnished reports angered President Mobutu Sese Seko. ''He doesn't say thank you. He doesn't say please. It's just, boom: get the job done...
...that grew out of that first small triumph, Twain would become, as Powers puts it, "the nation's first rock star." We know his voice only from written descriptions of it. It was resonant enough to hold a large lecture-hall audience rapt. He spoke in a slow backwoods drawl, with many strategic pauses. In 1891 he experimented with an Edison dictating machine but concluded that "you can't write literature with it." (He liked to have a human secretary taking notes and laughing in the right places.) But he wasn't the sort of funny man who laughs...
...corporate headquarters, Tom Katinas has been shaking things up since he arrived from Exxon, based in Irving, Texas, in April 2007. "In the past, people came in at the bottom and worked their way to the top," says Katinas from his fourth-floor corner office, in a Sopranos-style drawl that reveals his Brooklyn roots. "There weren't enough new ideas...
...against Rush, believes Obama learned the art of public speaking at the scores of black churches he visited in 2000, absorbing the rhythm and flourishes of pastors and watching how their congregations reacted. David Mendell notes in his biography of Obama how the candidate would "drop into a Southern drawl, pepper his prose with a neatly placed 'ya'll' and call up various black colloquialisms." He rarely missed a chance to speak at Sunday services in black churches, where, Mendell writes, he linked his candidacy to the larger march forward of African Americans. He emphasized his Christian faith and often...