Word: idioms
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...Feud as a tale is hardly distinguished. Berger's telling is. His language, rich in prewar idiom, is precise and laconic, the perfect foil to his slapstick plot. At first encounter, the characters appear to have been made of pig bladders, but the deeper their predicaments, the more convincing they become. The romance between Bernice and Ernie, a Hornbeck layabout, has the ring of lowlife truth. Says a sincere Ernie after a night of backseat love and a bottle of Rock 'n' Rye: "I'm sure trying to figure out a way to tell you what...
...ordinary and then give the distinct impression that his subject is not worth writing about. In the middle of a discussion of the problems posed by minimalist composer Philip Glass, he says of the subject of an earlier essay. "A composer like [Frederic] Rzewski can shift facilely from idiom to idiom because, to be blunt, nobody cares what he does, least of all the people...
...kinship as it is. Rape itself may be a form of murder, the destruction of someone's will and spirit. No wonder those same soldiers in Viet Nam spoke of dragging girls into the woods "for a little boom-boom." To "bang" a woman remains part of the idiom. The sound is a gun, the body a weapon. In a "gang bang," murder becomes a massacre...
...slips into sentimentality. "Hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place, hands on hips, straight-backed, round-bellied, high-behinded women" have no interest or time to be maudlin. In this first novel, Naylor also demonstrates a rare mastery of the Black idiom and a delicate sense of balance in her usage. Chronology, the anathema of many a more seasoned writer, is the building block of the novel. Flashbacks, recollections and some of the finest dream sequences in contemporary fiction, intermingle to make each story strikingly circular, each one returning to a face...
...Allen in 1971, when Washington began to fight back. To the citizens of Dallas, Allen came to be known as "Richard Nixon with a whistle." Both saw service with Whittier College's rugged football squad, the Poets, and just as Nixon habitually spoke of world calamities in the idiom of sports, Allen regularly referred to football games in terms of Armageddon. There were other similarities...