Word: epigram
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...conscious of what any reading audience wants, to bypass the senses. Maybe he appeals to them too often. We develop such faith in his experience -- such confidence in his brilliantly modulated rhetoric -- that we are willing to accept almost any statement as poetically valid, even passages where epigram takes the place of idiom, and ideology assumes the role of experience...
Kerr often brings off a bright epigram: "Cruelty, carried far enough, can turn into Al Capp"; "Inadmissible Evidence is so many slivers run under all the fingernails in the auditorium." No critic, in fact, pays such meticulous attention to his prose. Indeed, he sometimes sacrifices content to style and overwrites. He trotted out a veritable Noah's Ark to praise Barbra Streisand's performance in Funny Girl: "She's like a grasshopper, a shy one . . . she's an eel on a chair, nibbling at flowers . . . second cousin to an octopus on a chaise longue...
...answer is: very little. Juan Bosch captured the problem several weeks ago in a typical epigram: "These elections are a fine solution for the U.S. but none at all for the Dominican Republic." Free elections allow CBS reporters, as one did last week, to enthuse about "the transition from ballots to bullets." This alliterative interpretation overlooks the fact that there is absolutely no guarantee that this election will change Dominican political realities any more than did the 1962 exercize...
Again a Bosch epigram cuts to the essence of the matter: "I have long known the Dominican Republic could not have democracy without the United States; now I see we cannot have democracy with the United States." For democracy is more than a technically free election. It is a way of running a society. Until the Republic can build a democratic society, it cannot enjoy a genuinely democratic government. And there will be no democratic society until the U.S. ceases supporting and financing all the anti-democratic interest groups in that society...
...Rather little wool for a very great cry." George Saintsbury's epigram was Ann Radcliffe's epitaph; for more than a century her quaint gothic masterpiece has been buried among bookworms. Yet for half a century before that, from 1794 until the triumph of Dickens and Thackeray, The Mysteries of Udolpho was an international bestseller, acclaimed by Coleridge as "the most interesting novel in the English language." It enchanted Keats, who under its influence wrote The Eve of St. Agnes; it electrified Byron, who stole its hero and called him Childe Harold; it directly inspired Sir Walter Scott...