Word: franca
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...same applies to the liberal use of quotation marks, which run through the books like tiny underscoring arrows. The Message to the Planet is overly fond of this intrusive nudging. Here is the latest Murdoch female masochist in full lament: "Franca contained in her breast a storm of anguish and violence so terrible that she had at times, when she was alone and longing to 'break down,' to clutch her breast." Terrible, for that matter, is a favorite word. So are appalling, awful, horrible, dreadful and all forms of the word dark. "These dreadful ideas, horrors from the past...
That process could have been the coup de grace for Yiddish, a fusion of German, Hebrew and Slavic languages that was the lingua franca of Ashkenazic Jews for most of the past millennium. In this century the language had already suffered the cataclysm of the Holocaust as well as the adoption of English by most North American Jews, the suppression of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union, and the decision by Israel to bypass Yiddish and give Hebrew the status of a national language. Lansky, who in 1979 was a graduate student in Yiddish literature at McGill University in Montreal...