Word: elocutionist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Acid Test. A. T. & T. has not only grown up with the nation; it helped it to grow. Every moviegoer who saw Don Ameche star in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell* knows how the first telephone call was made. Bell was no electrician but an elocutionist and teacher of the deaf. He thought that he could devise a mechanical gadget like the human ear to transmit and receive voices by electrical impulse, had a crude instrument made according to his specifications by his assistant, Thomas Watson. Bell was fiddling with the instrument in the attic of a Boston rooming...
...five feet, five and one-half inches tall" and a cloth long enough to hide his legs. Once these details were disposed of, Copey's classroom manner was awe-inspiring. George Santayana wrote, "Copeland was an artist rather than a scholar; he was a public reader by profession, an elocutionist." A green bookbag and a glass of water always attended him. Cross-drafts, coughing and similar annoyances received no tolerance. Before speaking, he would give the audience a minute or two in which to do all the coughing or sneezing they intended to do in the next hour...
...good, bad and mediocre disks, there are some surprising disappointments. Siobhan McKenna's reading of Molly Bloom's sensuous soliloquy from James Joyce's Ulysses lacks both the virago drive and the Lilith languors of that Protean whore; Dame Peggy Ashcroft sounds too much the maidenly elocutionist for the passionate verses in her assorted Poetry Readings (London). London's Sherlock Holmes disk goes to the other extreme as three mighty hams-Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson. Orson Welles-rant and thunder through Dr. Watson Meets Sherlock Holmes and The Final Problem, in a tatter-tearing...
...Harvard has not deserted rhetoric," associate professor Frederick C. Packard told the General Speech Association of Eastern States last weekend. "But rhetoric," he continued, "has deserted speech. The real trouble with speech courses is that they have been victimized by the elocutionist movement. Speech trainers are often mere coachers in a flashy showmanship...