Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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When there were packets on the Atlantic the sailors in them were called rats. Packet rats talked in a peculiar idiom. To them the ocean was a slope, as it was to Virgil's sailors. From west to east they called "downhill," from east to west "uphill." Last week a 20-foot whaleback lifeboat with four Dutchmen in it sailed out of the Thames into the Channel. One of the Dutchmen is 70 years old. He, Jacob Schuttvaer, designer of the lifeboat, wants to prove it is unsinkable. His boat has neither wireless nor auxiliary motor. With...
...Congregation of St. Maur-sur-Loire who helped to give the order its great tradition of scholarsh/p and learning: even to imagine in him a descendant of that hardy voyager who first collected the ancient chronicles, flowered with miracles and wars, to transmute them into the cool idiom of immortality...
...history of God's doings; acutely insensitive persons have, for example, deleted from certain chapters all mention of alcoholic liquor, substituting, for such, babbling nouns, or pallid and incoherent adjectives. More valuable and more reasonable are modern efforts to rewrite the King James Version in a prose idiom which more nearly approaches present day vernacular. Of such efforts, the best known...
...person who is able to see, language seems entirely a visual idiom. The gigantic concept of enabling those who cannot see, to imagine the meanings of the words they read, was the beginning of an extraordinary change in the condition of people who had heretofore been only a little less tragically useless than lepers. Now competent organizations function to aid the blind. In Mount Healthy, the Trader sisters, one blind, both with foresight, have established the Clovernook Press. There, by subscription, are printed books in braille. Kindly senators pass laws; a beneficent government charges no postage on books mailed...
...about what tendencies he had observed in modern American music, he said that so much was being composed that it was hard to tell, but that he had noticed a bent toward smoother rhythm and harmony "Since I wrote the rhapsody several pieces have been written in the American idiom, call it jazz, blues or what you will I believe that in a few years classics will appear that could not have been composed anywhere except in the United States...