Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Writing in his accustomed idiom of the lower East Side, Odets has made Noah (played by Menasha Skulnik) a symbol of fatalistic determinism while his son, Japheth (played by Mario Alcalde), represents the viewpoint that God wants men to work out their own fate. This clash (played by a rudder for the Ark, which Japheth insists upon and which Noah calls a sinful negation of God's Will) is not a startling new theme, but is well dramatized and well acted...
Adenauer had hand-picked Theodor Blank to organize Germany's new army precisely to avoid the traditional working-class hostility to the army. No heel-clicking, stiff-backed militarist, but an ex-union official who still speaks in the pawky idiom of the Ruhr workman...
...compulsively burst into applause as he passed. "The American people took M. Mendes-France to their hearts,'' said U.S. Ambassador to France Douglas Dillon, "and I can fairly state that . . . Franco-American relations have never been better." Said the Gaullist Aurore, trying its hand at a U.S. idiom: "France got back into the big league, and by the main entrance...
...Pepicelli," the first story, by James Buechler is written in the idiom of an Italian laborer. Had it been done poorly, the prose might have spoiled the treatment of a simple mind confronted by the mysterious, in this case a motorcycle. To Pepicelli, the machine becomes a sort of magic carpet or Genie, and escape from a stolid, unromantic wife. But the motorcycle is not only an escape, it is an end in itself, it becomes his mistress, and in the end it and Pepicelli disappear down the street, never to return...
...profundity, and then lights invariably on the latter's side. There are many trite lines in his exposition, but he uses them to advantage, and they seem to enhance rather than detract from a description. It is unwise to think that he is consciously striving for an idiom, because his range of character cannot be so confined. Perhaps the best that can be said of this prose is that it is intriguing. It is also wonderfully readable...