Word: idioms
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Dates: during 1910-1919
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...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...
...that most completely achieves its purpose is the anonymous "Les Lauriers sont Coupes," a vividly remembered picture of childhood in Brussels, full of detail yet unified and effective. Of the stories, Mr. Plummer's "Full o' the Moon" catches the spirit of Irish legend, though the effort at Irish idiom is a trifle apparent; and Mr. Grant Code's "The Smile" places an old theme in an up-to-date Central American setting with considerable success. The articles on topics of the day begin with Mr. J. S. Watson's "Art and Artificiality," a not quite articulate protest against...
...frankly unpretentious, and frank unpretentiousness is not invariably a characteristic of undergraduate writing. Also it seldom offends by incorrectness of expression. To be sure, one is obliged to ask himself in reading the review of Mr. Masefield's "Good Friday and Other Poems," whether usage has sanctioned as English idiom the illogical phrase, "centre about"? One must also ask himself what the reviewer of Mr. Conrad's "Within the Tides" means in speaking of the author's "usual superlative style." Apparently the reviewer does not mean, as one might at first think, that Mr. Conrad usually writes in superlatives...