Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Scissors & Paste. Olivier was determined to make the play clear in every line and every word-even to those who know nothing of Shakespeare. For the most part, he manages to elucidate even the trickiest turns of idiom by pantomime or a pure gift for thought transference. But wherever it has seemed necessary, old words have been changed for new. Recks not his own rede becomes Minds not his own creed. In all, there are 25 such changes. Some are debatable, but the principle is sound. It is equally sound, of course, to cut the text. There are purists...
...poems were few, full of ironic understatement, salted with a special diction (blending Biblicisms, Latinity. medieval English, Southern idiom) and peppered with paradoxes. Says Harvard's F. 0. Matthiessen: "Some of the best minor poems in our language...
...foreign-born conductors, Britten's English idiom was new, at first forbidding and finally fascinating. Said white-haired, Russian-born Conductor Emil Cooper, who will conduct the first performance of Grimes: "For 40 years I am a conductor, but I do not know English opera before. There is no difficulty in doing Italian opera; when you start you know what you are doing. French and German the same. This is somehow different . . . the rhythms and inflections of English speech which Britten gets into his music. . . . But I am excited...
...before the war, had a brilliant record in the Front National, in which Catholics and Communists fought the Germans side by side. In his marked northern accent he quotes from Cardinal Newman and Plato, but he also uses proletarian vulgarisms such as "On s'en fout" (an untranslatable idiom which means, roughly, the hell with it), and slang such as "Celui-là, on le descendra" (that fellow's going to get bumped...
...mistake to let him tangle-as a hero, anyhow-with the ladies. In love scenes his curious languor, which suggests Bing Crosby supersaturated with barbiturates, becomes a brand of sexual complacency that is not endearing. Jane Greer, on the other hand, can best be described, in an ancient idiom, as a hot number...