Word: idiom
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...Morrison's essay, "The City of Mice", like all of his work that I have seen, is beautifully written. It really succeeds in its intention of exalting the ridiculous to the sublime. The author has breathed new life into the bygone idiom of poetic prose, and made it his own. Something should come of this. Mr. Hathaway, in his "Recollections of Reality", enlisted my sympathies with a corkscrew, and then began to alienate them with trout flies. Personally, I have always shunned as tedious any discussion of the superfluous and objectionable passion for hooking fish. But Mr. Hathaway broke down...
...considerable advance toward perfect expression in language. Moreover, professors and literati, who have hitherto gazed haughtily down upon the rabble from the rarified heights of correct speech, would suffer a righteous degradation. Yet it is never too late to learn, and these latter might in time master the new idiom. It would certainly be amusing to hear the ingenuous members of English A rebuked for using "isn't" instead of "aint...
...College Bestiary" should be a vade mecum for every underclassman. It is an accumulation of wisdom, sorted, labelled, illuminated, and, best of all, tucked away in an idiom that by its vigor and raciness will disarm even those who would like to shoot a preacher at sight. Wherever there is a saving grace of ambition in a student; these "characters" of college types and their glosses will be useful...
...think that some noted high school teacher should re-write such antiquated authors as Bacon, Shakespere, and Ben Jonson, putting them into up-to-date American English and giving them an American code of morality? It is so annoying to have to bother with an old idiom. It is for this reason, too, that a modern writer should tell us all about Rome for he not only is in a better position to judge of the life of the first century A.D. than would be a Pliny the Younger or a Juvenal, but he would give the information...
Most attractive, on the whole, among the sonnets I find Mr. Cowley's except "From the Diary of a Restoration Gentleman," which successfully imprisons within fixed form the loose and rambling idiom of Samuel Pepys. Some change of the second line which would avoid the double use in the rhyme position of the word "approach" would leave a sonnet of memorable power, beauty, and satirical point. Although Mr. MacVeagh's "Sonnet" is strongly reminiscent of Mr. E. A. Robinson's poetry, it is interesting and impressive in and for itself. In Mr. Norris's sonnet on the sonnet...