Word: idiom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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American Treadmill. Brel's idiom is barely translatable from Flemish to French, let alone from French to English. Blau and Shuman went an impossible step farther, translating English into American. Les Flamandes (The Flemish Women), for example, became Marathon, and metamorphosed from a Belgian character study into a portrayal of the American treadmill. Then came the hard part. Blau wanted the show staged with "everything floating, and the feeling that all was pressed against a tapestry of utter silence." Off-Broadway, utter silence is a phenomenon that usually occurs only after a show closes...
...faces of American literature, the bank tellers and insurance salesmen who wrote about existence in the evenings. We don't know about the red-skins, the Whitmans and Williamses and Ginsbergs and Olsons who didn't want to be English or metaphysical, but wrote about themselves in their own idiom. These poets are more ours than any others because they have written our language...
Whitman viewed the spoken idiom of Negro Americans as a source for a native grand opera. Its flexibility, its musicality, its rhythms, freewheeling diction and metaphors, as projected in Negro American folklore, were absorbed by the creators of our great 19th century literature even when the majority of blacks were still enslaved. Mark Twain celebrated it in the prose of Huckleberry Finn; without the presence of blacks, the book could not have been written. No Huck and Jim, no American novel as we know it. For not only is the black man a co-creator of the language that Mark...
...Mirza's sitar seemed to wail out emotion in a vocal idiom characteristic of the centuries-old Kirana school in which he was trained. While other schools of sitar-playing emphasize greater instrumentality, Mirza's "singing sitar style offers a welcome depth of feeling to the western listener who has difficulty intellectualizing the sophisticated raga system...
Throw up our hands-an interesting idiom. The modern day bandit operates in the realm of jet airplanes. But blow up a plane? Preposterous. At least that was the reaction of the sixty passengers on United's flight 249 from Denver to Portland. The threat seemed very distant until the FBI men spoke: "Do any of you know any reason why someone would want to kill you? Can you think of any reason in your private lives to make someone want to do this?" The bomb scare was a dramatic event and the passengers tended to be detached, to view...