Word: idiom
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...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...
...seven and one-half years, WPA had spent $10½ billions and employed 8,000,000 persons with some 30,000,000 dependents. Long the butt of cartoonists, its more frivolous projects made the word "boondoggle"* an American idiom. But the bulk of its funds were spent in constructing 644,000 miles of roads, 77,000 bridges, 116,000 buildings (schools, city halls, libraries, hospitals, police stations, armories, courthouses, museums), and enlarging and improving 800 airports. WPA also published a series of state guidebooks, decorated many a public building with murals, restored many a historic shrine, sponsored tuberculosis research...
...Good day" in Japanese is Konnichi wa (literal translation: "As for today . . ."). Another idiom: to say "I want whiskey," Japanese observe politely Toki-doki uisuki ga hoshii desu ("Now and then whiskey is desirable...
...young nation agreed with them. Its art was best and most beautiful in all that was most immediately useful to a rural civilization. The work of men's hands became "a common language of hand and eye," with marked divergences of idiom-the New Englander's "downright pleasure in stripped forms and beautifully finished plain surfaces," the more complex art of figurehead carving, the decorative designs of the Pennsylvania Germans which (derived from the manuscript paintings of medieval monasteries) gave expression to "all the great ceremonial relationships...