Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Idiom. From her tenth year through her 19th, the most formative time of her life, Mei-ling Soong lived in the U.S. While one of her older sisters went to Wesleyan College (Macon, Ga.), she stayed with friends in nearby Piedmont, learning the idiom and the point of view. She bought gumdrops at Hunt's general store with the other girls, and went hazel-nutting with them. She was always the one who was teased, but through the teasing she learned American gags. Later the girls went north to a summer school. A history teacher asked Mei-ling...
...Chinese Idiom. By the time she went back to Shanghai in 1917, Mei-ling knew the U.S. as few Americans do. But she hardly knew her own country. She found a Chinese teacher and learned to speak, read & write Chinese. Gradually she took on Chinese dress. As a beautiful member of the distinguished Soong family, she cavorted to feasts, rode in jodhpurs. But as a girl with a rigid conscience, she joined the Y.W.C.A. and the Child Labor Commission. She had a horror of untidiness: an English friend describes how she impatiently snatched a dustcloth from a shiftless amah...
...library is a useless place. That is, for the average undergraduate; unless he is able to read languages other than English. A book in English is looked upon as a rarity at the library. Greek, Latin, Pig-Latin, French (Louis Quatorze style), and Esperanto seem to be the popular idiom among the clientele of the establishment, most of whom have spent a good deal of their lives learning to read these languages so that they might peek into one of the many thousands of volumes therein. These people, their friends call them curators, also know something about comparative zoology...
...were the chief instigators of the habit of listening to a fixed program night after night. They were the great American institution of blackface comedy at its greatest spread and financial return. Their droll dramatizations, a blend of simple narrative interest and skillful characterization, caught the Negro attitude and idiom without burlesque...
...Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources ($7.50) was as rich a book for ruminators as the year brought; and The American Thesaurus of Slang ($5), edited by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark, came about as near completely corralling the living, dead and deathless in native idiom as could be humanly expected of one volume. The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music ($3.95) was the most comprehensive book of its kind ever assembled...