Word: idiom
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...been a long-standing custom here at TIME for our overseas correspondents, most of whom are American-trained journalists, to return to their native U.S. at frequent intervals for firsthand conversations with TIME'S editors and a reacquaintance with the changing American scene and idiom. Seldom, however, do we have a chance to greet a correspondent who is visiting the U.S. for the first time...
...more fashionable than God's or man's will as an explanation of all human acts. Various types of mental sickness (amnesia, etc.) have been used and used again as springboards for psychological thrillers. In fact, the theme has become so familiar that a relatively new visual idiom has been worn down into a bag of movie cliches (the close-up of the vague eye, the trick shot of all outdoors whirling round & round, the heart beating an audible tom-tom, the psychiatrist with his smooth sofa-side manner...
...Bible as "literature." He paid scant attention to the rich, rhythmic prose of the King James version. He worked directly from the Latin, Hebrew and Greek texts, hoping to get the sense across and letting the poetry fall where it might. But he avoided using a specifically modern idiom because it would soon be obsolete again; his aim was to achieve a kind of timeless English...
Laguerre's use of the American idiom to make his point is one of the special qualifications he has for his job as TIME'S chief correspondent in Paris. A quiet, bespectacled Frenchman, he also probably has as intimate a knowledge of French and Western European politics as any reporter on the continent. He picked up his knowledge of the American idiom by virtue of some years spent in San Francisco, where his father was French Consul, his unquenchable enthusiasm for American baseball as a sports reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle. A fortnight ago he renewed both...
Author Heym's uncertainty with American idiom and American psychology is frequently apparent. His prose is surprisingly matter of fact and informal for an acquired language, but it is nevertheless flat and lacks any quality of suspense. Americans are not likely to think of themselves as having worked for "the great chemical trust." They are not likely to say to a girl in the morning: "The night was in your face." They would not characterize a Nazi: "[He] belonged to the strata of activists." The characters have a constant consciousness of position, prestige and appearances that Americans...