Word: idioms
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...fashionable, hissed the villains, cheered the heroes. Mr. Morley's latest attempt to make money exploits Joan Lowell, touted literary hoax-mistress (The Cradle of the Deep). It is a maritime melodrama, written by her husband, which permits her to maneuver in the shrouds and employ the nautical idiom. But it is not funny, either in itself, or in the manner of its predecessors...
Scholar Abbe Niles definitely fixes the father of "blues" and therefore grand- father of all jazz as William Christopher Handy, colored, first (1910) composer in the national idiom...
...Author Chapman has few physical descriptions, thus she has a hard job delineating character. Almost wholly she lets her people talk and describe themselves thereby; that far, at least, she succeeds with character. Indeed, her plots being fragile and her style under the influence of Thomas Hardy, the Tennessee idiom remains as her only virtue. Says...
...have been haunted always by the Southern highlanders' need of a recorder. Being driven to frenzy by the futility of outland interpretation, I at last took up the work of their defense. To do this it has been necessary to make a long study of their idiom and the dialects from which it is compounded, and to reduce their grammar and syntax to a definite working scheme...
Most obvious of the indications of the lack of sympathy between this author and the modern world is his vocabulary. It includes the frequent use of archaisms and unusual words such as "rathe," "sonant," "unimpasted," which are not found in the average abridged dictionary. The attempt to recover the idiom of another age so deliberate that the writer cannot have realized the many-times repeated truth that the Elizabethtn poets were not works with "thees" and "dosts" and "wilts." Among their contemporaries the words were in good and familiar usage, and a writer three hundred years later is not justified...