Word: englishes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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During the 18th century, the English had to pay taxes on the windows in their houses. When another kind of window tax was proposed in Hartford, Conn., last year, the good citizens responded enthusiastically. The beneficiary of the revenue, after all, was not the British war chest but a restoration fund for the nation's oldest statehouse, a building that dates back to 1796. The method of taxation was unorthodox: $5 for every window with a view of the historic building...
...ways of their previous masters, but they are fatefully wedded to them. It is a condition frequently encountered in Naipaul's work. He once wrote about asking for the local guava jelly in one of Trinidad's intellectual clubs, only to be told that they only had English greengage...
Some plays are the comic books of the theater. All of their characters are caricatures. Their situations have the labeled banality of canned clichés. The dialogue is Cro-Magnon English. In scene after scene the ludicrous and the dreadful intersect at some flash point where the playgoer's ribs collapse in implausible laughter...
...Give Playwright Louis La Russo II credit for knowing his Italo-American dropouts, fighters with four-letter mouths. He plants neon stickers on his key figures. The good guy (Danny Aiello) is Over-the-Hill. The bad guy (Edward O'Neill) is Below-the-Belt. There is an English Eliza Doolittle (Margaret Warncke) for whose favors they stage a slam-bang finale. Too bad someone forgot to throw in the towel...
...extraordinary thing happened in Moscow a few days later when Vance arrived to negotiate with Gromyko: Semyonov was repudiated by his bosses. Gromyko stuck to the Soviet refusal to include even a limited ban on encryption in SALT. Over lunch, he said in English, "On this question I am like a stone wall." Kornienko said acidly that Semyonov "didn't understand our position." Vance...