Word: idioms
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...Afro, whose songs about love, evil, oppression, freedom, Jesus and promised lands are a kind of ecumenical apotheosis of the blues. Still blind, Wonder in the eleven years of his professional career has distilled a wide array of black and white musical styles into a hugely popular personal idiom that emphatically defines where pop is at right...
...fact, on one level this emotional mechanism--which turns to obvious sadness in the end--works fine. It's a kid having some fun, feeling the oats of acceptance for the first time. Except for the expletives--which are the film's idiom, and still form an expressive language--this could be a children's film. Or an old Hollywood picture, in the good sense of recalling simple emotions buried since a wide-eyed and easily-swayed childhood. When the kid grins and drools drunkenly, it's sweet...
...feels very sensitive, he says in Strong Opinions, about his lack of a natural vocabulary. He echoes what he said in the afterword to Lolita: My private tragedy, which cannot, indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English. He feels caught between Russian, for which he no longer has an audience, and English, which to him still feels "stiff and artificial," however brilliant his success with...
Mean Streets, justly so, because this brutal screeching vision of streetcorner life in Little Italy is as hard to ignore as a fire in the theater. Certaily this semi-biographical film is daring enough-Martin Scorsese toys with improvisational acting, extremely stylized directing and a dialogue built around an idiom of cliches, and so laid himself open to charges of amateurishness. But there is nothing naive about the feeling for conditioned response and social context in the characterizations here. Scorsese, Robert de Niro and others give the streets a searing energy, a rat's den's sense of confinement, that...
...military is now in such disgrace that even the Minister of Defense wears a business suit in public, rather than his general's uniform. Nonetheless, competent civilians still hesitate taking power, because they have long viewed participation in politics with distaste. In fact the Thai language uses the idiom "to play at politics" rather than "to go into politics." Thus even Sanya Dhamasakti, the popular civilian who has been temporary Prime Minister for the past three months, wants to return quickly to his job as rector of Bangkok's Thammasat University...