Word: grammars
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...master of the unexpected, violence is not his specialty. Leonard's principal virtues are a Panasonic ear and an infallible sense of character. His narrative tone is that of the man across the airplane aisle who has a good story to tell, if only he could trust you. Grammar is irrelevant; sentences seem to have been delivered, not written: "At approximately 1:30 a.m. he saw the Silver Mark VI traveling south on John R at a high rate of speed with a black Buick like nailed to its tail." His humor is stag: "When the girls would...
...playing one ambiguity off against another makes for poor grammar, it makes for even worse public policy. The solutions to society's problems need not be sample, but if government provides no answers, it is no government--or at least bad government And nowhere is strong governmental guidance more important than with burning, divisive social issues such as racial or sexual discrimination, without federal leadership, progress toward equality for all will stagnate in the face of countless local battles...
...monologue without intermission is sleep-inducing. Besides, Nixon (Philip Baker Hall) drops names and scandals in such an incoherent jumble that only someone minutely familiar with his career can grasp what is going on. Mixing facts and falsehood, he'll jump from the topic of Watergate to his first grammar school debate (he argued that girls were no good and won). What's more, he constantly interrupts his stream of jibberish, by raising his arms and launching into political rhetoric, by strewing papers around the room and slipping on them, or by going into prayer...
They are also probably the nation's most visible social failure. The homeless are everywhere. Theirs, however, is an ad hoc, nook-and-cranny geography. Hunkered down near a fence between a San Francisco freeway overpass and a grammar school. Asleep in the back room of an unguarded Chicago mortuary. Squatting near by in the dark eighth floor of an abandoned rooming house. Scrunched, and occasionally killed, inside Anchorage garbage dumpsters...
...indeed measure a lot of intangibles, such as how much grammar and vocabulary a student gets in high school English or even what kind of conversations his family holds around the dinner table. But the Achievement Tests measure much more directly a quality the student has even less control over: the quality of the high school curriculum. A student at a mediocre high school may have little chance of scoring well on the verbal SAT, but is he really any more likely to ace the Chem Achievement? Ironically, the fact that Achievements predict freshman grade point averages better than SATs...