Word: idioms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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After starting in homely Midwest idiom ("I would sure appreciate appearing on your program"), the letter from St. Louis minced no words: "I have a remarkable memory . . . My knowledge is fabulous . . . amazing . . . monumental . . . I am a human almanac of information." The producers of the $64,000 Challenge felt skeptical about the letter and doubtful when, after repeated applications, they finally saw the writer, a $70-a-week supply clerk who quit school at 13. But by last week Theodore Nadler, 47, had lived up to his own billing, piled up $64,000 on the show, and was simultaneously taking...
Concludes Fadiman: "With authoritative teachers by the thousands daily and nightly teaching Televenglish to 170 million students, it is likely that in 50 years the Televenglish professor will be examining an obsolescent minority idiom known as English, just as today the academic linguist studies the argot of thieves or the slang of the hashhouse counterman...
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 8 (Hallé Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbirolli; Mercury). A sweeping, full-throated song, written with far more springtime power and heat than might be expected from an 83-year-old, but in a harmonic idiom that suits his age. Barbirolli's orchestra matches Williams' enthusiasm note for note, dyne...
...orchestral style of the period, and orchestrated Hallelujah with the clack of a stock ticker as its motif. The narration of the film, the second in a Project 20 trilogy (first: The Great War; third: The Story of the Thirties), is redolent with the decade's slangy idiom, from "Let's get blotto" to "Nerts." Better yet, not only for its authentic ring but for its unforeseen link to the unsummonable past, the idiom is spoken in the friendly, adenoidal singsong of Comedian Fred Allen, who died last March soon after finishing...
...Rilke Songs, by Frederic Rzewski, which followed, are written in a twelve-tone idiom of particular expressivity. They are for soprano with piano accompaniment, and are based upon two poems from the Book of Hours. Rzewski's music, although not easily accessible, is definitely to be reckoned with. In the first song particularly, there were moments of real beauty...