Word: idioms
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...marvelous language that Heaney has found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again. All translations, especially of poetry, involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows these rules to the letter in such lines...
...this is not a bash Celine Dion blurb. Too easy. And plus, I kind of feel bad for her. She's a very talented singer who just has no clue (look up the idiom "blank expression" in the dictionary and you'll find a picture of her). So it turns out that Thumper (or Tarzan--I call her various names, all reflective of her tendency to pound her chest in exultation) is writing an "intimate" autobiography to be released sometime next year. I have zero patience, so I came up with a possible page from the forthcoming biography...
...while View is sprinkled with pop (including a doo-wop quartet and a Puccinified version of Paper Doll), Bolcom has succeeded in smelting many disparate styles into a tightly unified idiom all his own. There are times when the openhearted lyricism of a Leonard Bernstein would have been welcome, but the lean, laconic score keeps the action moving, lending Miller's kitchen-table naturalism a freshening touch of poetry. Add in Josephson's star-quality performance as Eddie, the exemplary staging of Frank Galati (who directed Broadway's Ragtime) and Santo Loquasto's angular set--the Brooklyn Bridge as painted...
...When I have been fortunate enough to travel to London, I hear the many dialects but see through to the German and Anglo-Saxon roots, the transparencies just beyond. The idiom is more immediate, or in an alternate-universe way. How did we settle on "Call me" instead of "Ring me"? "Putting me on" instead of "having me on"? Drugs money, way out--the Latin "exit" just wrenches you ever after! When you are frustrated by a friend, do you say, "it really does me brains in?" Will you next time, instead of "it bugs...
...their work expressed the belief that the ultimate source of a sublime African-American art was to be found in the vernacular--the myths and folktales, the language games such as the dozens and signifying, and the sorrow songs and blues out of which each fashioned a sophisticated jazz idiom. And most audaciously of all, each believed the fundamental structuring principle of Negro art--improvisation--was also the essence of American democracy. The ultimate Americans, then, were Negro Americans. And America's self-generated curse was its perversely willed evasion of its full identity, an identity as black...