Word: eared
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...haunting lirone shaped like early venuses. The blockflutes, the recorders with their warm and woody sound. The tiny baroque guitar, cradled like a courageous lap-dog, and the harpsichords, the harpsichords: banquet tables of the basso-continuo; two banks of oars pulling across the river of the ear...
...enigmatic man called Saradjeff arrived with them to oversee their installation and playing. He is vividly described by Mason Hammond in a 1936 document preserved in the Harvard University Library. Saradjeff was supposed to be a genius of ringing--a tortured but prolific composer of carillons with an ear tuned to the exact pitch of bronze. His face had been horribly disfigured during the war. He spoke no English and had a history of epilepsy. Without delay Saradjeff retired to the basement of J and K entries to tune the smaller bells, a cacophonous process involving endless tapping and filing...
...tragedy for the bell project. He left only partial plans for the bell's hanging, and he was the only man around with any comprehensive knowledge of their playing. The bells are tuned to an eastern scale, supposedly a mixture of Byzantine and Tartar influences, which, to the Western ear gives their carillons a haunting and unfamiliar sound. No one here is quite sure how to play them or what music they were cast for. Aara admits that it is only through a lengthy apprenticeship that one begins to recognize the bells as a playable instrument. Her performances hinge...
...saying a sex shop, no matter how posh, doesn't belong on a main shopping avenue--tried to get it moved to a side street. But the opposing retailers could not find any legal reason to keep the shop off O'Connell Street, and the company turned a deaf ear to their appeals to leave...
Language as it evolves is like the game of Broken Telephone, in which a whispered phrase gets increasingly distorted as it passes from lip to ear. Eventually speakers no longer discern the rule behind a motley set of mangled verbs. They just memorize them as a list, as do subsequent generations. These are the irregulars, the fossils of dead rules...