Word: idiom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Like its original, the modern Gothic novel is prone to interest in tombs, graveyards, menacing strangers, cryptic portents, castles and ghosts. These are all present in A Singular Man, cleverly transposed into the idiom of contemporary Manhattan and ancillary Fairfield County. Smith has a great marble mausoleum under construction, air-conditioned, flood-and earthquake-proof. Smith moodily lurks there from time to time. The ghosts are of the contemporary autobiographical kind-Smith's own spectral guilty memories acquired in a posh Jesuit prep school. The furies are represented by the Press. Evil is represented by the abandoned power-bitch...
...stories The Magic Barrel, which won the National Book Award in 1959, Malamud has been recognized as a unique voice in U.S. literature. He catches his vulnerable characters in lurid movement and mid-passion-as if frozen in the light of a signal flare. His ear for Jewish idiom is unfailingly exact. ("We didn't starve, but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.") But the very quality that makes him an original talent-his feeling for the expressive, flaringly emotional reaches of the Jewish temperament-sometimes leads him astray, causing him to inject into...
...except for the British) Avenue of Joyous Entry. There are 2,450 Eurocrats-one-fourth of them translators who cope with the Brussels Babel of French, Dutch, Italian and German-and their aim is an overall European plan that will eventually govern production, wages and investment capital. In every idiom, they constantly repeat: "We are past the point of no return...
...hard to tell whether the utter tedium of George Nugent's String Quartet, Gerald Bennett's Three Songs, and James Webster's String Quartet should be blamed on the performers or the composers. In all three works, it is clear that the composers have approached the common idiom of twentieth century music--and beneath a few musical pinnacles, there really is one--much as a snake eats a rat: by swallowing it whole and unchewed. Giving the details of the ingestion would be too painful here. Three Psalm Fragments, by Thomas Benjamin, received a spirited performance by a selected chorus...
Bourgeois Negroes at first winced at Charles's almost burlesque use of Negro idiom: it seemed embarrassingly clear that no white man could ever sing the songs his way. Today, though Charles still sings the same "race music," there is no modern singer who has not learned something from him. His touches turn up in other singers' styles; his trademark phrases, such as "What'd I say" and "Don't you know now" and "That's all right," poke out from everybody's rhythm choruses like passwords to success. But the man himself remains...