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Learning Vietnamese is appropriately perplexing. With its six distinct tonal levels, it is as hard to master as the country's current politics and history. To sift through the grammar is easy enough but the tonal business is frustrating. One word may have two, three, or even four completely different meanings depending upon the pitch and stress you use. There is a well-known and true story of Robert McNamara's difficulty with the language on his frequent visits to Saigon. He likes to make a small pleasantry to his Vietnamese audience--usually "Vietnam for 1000 years." Unfortunately his aides...
There are more benefits to this approach than just increasing the efficiency of vocational training. Students could spend the time between grammar school and the start of their apprentice programs in specially devised general education courses in economics, politics, or other subjects directly related to the world of work. Such training programs would be racially integrated since they could draw upon students from all parts of the metropolitan region. Integration could be ensured by equal opportunities clauses in all training contracts...
...they had never met him. In their original version, Clyde was a homosexual; he and Bonnie shared the favors of C. W. Moss in a weird menage a trois. At the time, Truffaut was working on Farenheit 451, but he took a week off to teach the writers the grammar of film making, what the camera could see and say. After turning them loose, he then turned them clown because he was still too involved in Farenheit to do the movie with them...
Prince Erie boasts some of the finest dialog heard on a stage in-recent years. Mayer's speeches combine formal rhythms and precise images with deliberately chosen colloquialisms and small mistakes in grammar, both creating characterization and recreating the formal journalistic idiom of the period. Reporting the market crash, the Heraldreporter ends his news story with, "Threats against Fisk are freely indulged in." Fisk's early employer Daniel Drew prays, "Deliver me from the House of the Harlot, Lord, and from the rest of this here lewd company who don't give two bits for Thy commandments...
Mayer's inversions are often tragically funny in context; Drew again, on being excluded from the business operations: "Them boys is getting a damn sight too cute." Fisk's dialog masterfully combines bad grammar and vernacular with innumerable phrases from the Bible. "Poor suffering bastards," he yells at the crowd he has cheated, "You want your money? It has gone where the woodbine twineth...