Word: idioms
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...most pungent when he talks of writers and writing. Of modern verse he complains, "Sometimes I feel that there is a faraway country where much of the English poetry that is printed today was originally written. Our poets, without knowing the language well, translate it into that universal idiom known as translatese. Hence its lack of poetic rhythm, its inability to leave the ground. And when our poets do know how to write verse, they often pitch their tone very low as if to assure us that their lines will require no emotional response." Lytton Strachey, recalls the aphorist, once...
Mead wrote her other books in the same easily understood idiom. Coming of Age was quickly followed by Growing Up in New Guinea, which she wrote in collaboration with her second husband, New Zealand Psychologist Reo Fortune. But anthropology alone could not satisfy her. A fluent speaker who rarely needed notes, she also carried a heavy teaching schedule, lecturing before enthusiastic classes at both Columbia and Fordham universities. She established a hall of the Peoples of the Pacific at the American Museum of Natural History, where she was curator of ethnology. She brought a keen, insatiably curious mind and anthropological...
...byline-less features, the author(s) of its Nov. 6 cover story, "The New U.S. Farmer," had obviously studied up on his Adam Smith economics and his Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics in preparation for this defense of U.S. agriculture, "the productivity wonder of the world." Couched in Timese idiom, readers might almost be lulled into believing this bland prose. But beware -- it is really a simplistic, inaccurate polemic dressed up as objective journalism. It is Time at its myth-making best...
...lives of his characters: a bardic policeman who becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a tramp from his village, a spinster who lives with her father on a remote farm. It is a landscape out of Hardy, but with none of Hardy's ruminative asides; a master of idiom and intonation, Hanley relies on dialogue to disclose character. His prose reads like a play...
...does one write an autobiography confined to the first six years? Crews listened. The image of farmers sitting on their front porches in the sun and reminiscing is more than myth; it was from these garrulous sources that Crews acquired both his material and the lively idiom that animates his narrative. "A way of life gone forever out of the world" is recalled in these pages, enriched by a wealth of unlikely lore: how to estimate a mule's age, cook a possum, butcher...