Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Author Priestley contrives to have his hero bored by a Cincinnati Babbitt who remarks of his library of tourist literature: "I guess I've got the most complete one in the States." More profound and more profitable than Author Priestley's knowledge of U. S. idiom is his knowledge of how to give unreal characters an air of reality by letting them sit down in out-of-the-way places to chat about everyday matters like sex, communism, the cinema, debauchery, patriotism, honesty. The ramblings of Author Priestley's invention are limitless. They make Faraway what one of Author Priestley...
Prompted, doubtless, by recent activities of Clark Gable and James Cagney, Fairbanks speaks rudely to Joan Blondell. At one point he fetches her a light clip on the jaw. Though Authors Kubec Glasmon and John Bright wrote dialog in their own idiom, the original authors, Gene Fowler and Joe Laurie Jr., were obviously thinking of Grand Hotel and possibly Transatlantic. But the cinema?artistically at least?is a good borrower and the fact is that stories in the pattern of Grand Hotel, Transatlantic, Union Depot are magnificently suited to cinematic 'expression. Fast, brief, unlikely and compact, this one is almost...
...When snow flies." New England has many idioms rich and expressive, but none so beautiful as this. There is a softness, a merriment, a silence, a simple beauty about it that the rigorous, taciturn upcountrymen seldom achieve. This idiom, casually dropped across the counter of the general store when the mountains swelter in midsummer sun, brings to mind the far off ring of sleigh bells, and the white antiguity of hills...
...seems a long lane down which there is no corner. And on this lane the Vagabond must leave you. All that he might say has been said before, that which he could do no man would do. But it is his hope that these forces which have made the idiom false and empty may in themselves restore a truer, fuller moaning to his wish of a "Most Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year...
...student with no conception of the proper sound of a language to spend time in studying its poetry. Many who have lived abroad and who can already speak French or German fluently find repeated practice in talking a necessary means of retaining their facility in the foreign idiom. Besides offering a chance for actual practice this innovation affords an opportunity for valuable association with exchange students and professors...