Word: idioms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...canny observer has concluded without aid: that airports have grown less efficient, for example, or that the poor are more victimized by crime than the middle class. Specialization, abstraction and rhetorical overkill - all have made native wit afraid to show its face. Political candidates no longer employ the folk idiom in their speeches. Humorists rarely use the short, acute idiom of Lincoln, Twain - or a Hoosier caricaturist named Kin Hubbard. A pity. In the voice of Abe Martin, a wise old rustic, Hubbard once cracked: "Ther's some folks standin' behind the President that ought...
...self-destruction. But before their movement became the subject matter for ambitious "new journalists," the Beat Poets had already shaken the literary establishment by rejecting an academic formalism rooted in the poetry of Eliot and Pound. They replaced this sterile stuff with a free-wheeling experiential American poetic idiom inspired by the more cautious William Carlos Williams. Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," with its Whitmanesque catalogues of the poet's own undeniably hellish experience, became a banner around which the new American poets rallied...
Those same realistic filmmakers whom Godard so consistently disparages are the ones working in a popular idiom. Admittedly, their active contribution is small, but they at least legitimize much radical activity. From them, Godard could learn the political virtue of beginning with an audience, not just a theory...
...jowls jiggled. The eyebrows rolled up and down in waves. The forehead seemed seized by spasms. Yet the lips continuously courted a smile, suggesting an inner bemusement. The words tumbled out disarmingly, softened by the gentle Southern tones and the folksy idiom. But they conveyed a sense of moral outrage...
Soon nobody was gonging off Bird. In his 20s, he had already become a legend. He had given his name to Birdland, and along with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell had founded a whole new jazz idiom called bebop. The beginning came one night while Parker was playing Cherokee in a Manhattan chili house: he reached up and got his line by filching the top notes off the chords. By mingling spontaneous pirouettes of fanciful improvisations with a tune's melody he vastly expanded the freedom of musicians...