Word: idioms
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...taken at all. He uses a language that explodes with comic-book words like "POW!" and "boing." His sentences are shot with ellipses, stabbed with exclamation points, or bombarded with long lists of brand names and anatomical terms. He is irritating, but he did develop a new journalistic idiom that has brought relief from standard Middle-High Journalese. His outlook is partly cool, partly hysterical, and just slightly unconventional enough to make it provocative. The need for journalists like Wolfe is clear, and he has become the most talked about, the most imitated, if not the most bewildering journalist...
Readers wary of the plush language of the "gadzooks, hussy!" school may be suspicious of the special idiom of Bring Larks. But there is no Errol Flimflam here. Keneally has devised a garbled-Gaelic speech that seems perfectly to fit the character of his protagonist who, like another gifted innocent, Billy Budd, speaks with the tongue of men and angels. In fact the doomed man's only legacy is verses, hidden in a government ledger and negligently destroyed by a bored governor who could make nothing of them. One poem hopes that out of the cesspool, time will "bring...
With their vast and relentless power of amplification, the writers of commercials sprinkle more tag lines and catch phrases into the conversation than the poets, fettered to their paper and print, can ever hope to put into the American idiom. "A little dab'll do ya," "Fly the friendly skies" and "Leave the driving to us" are in fact a kind of pop poetry...
...works of Southern-dialect humorists. The other, "the real language," was the stuff of spirituals that has informed the sermons of preachers from the earliest days down to Martin Luther King; this undoubtedly was the diction used by Turner and his fellow insurrectionists. Thelwell charges that Styron's idiom, at once baroque and Latinate, Old Testament and Victorian, rendered Nat Turner in "a white language and a white consciousness...
Where soul is really at today is pop music. It emanates from the rumble of gospel chords and the plaintive cry of the blues. It is compounded of raw emotion, pulsing rhythm and spare, earthy lyrics?all suffused with the sensual, somewhat melancholy vibrations of the Negro idiom. Always the Negro idiom. LeRoi Jones, the militant Negro playwright, says: "Soul music is music coming out of the black spirit." For decades, it only reverberated around the edges of white pop music, injecting its native accent here and there; now it has penetrated to the core, and its tone and beat...