Word: monoglot
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Theroux speculates that as the Mediterranean's cities have grown larger physically, they have become smaller-minded and monoglot. Alexandria, as novelist Lawrence Durrell put it, was once home to "five races, five languages, a dozen creeds." Now it is a dull port of Arabic-speaking Arabs bound by one creed, Islam. Theroux finds the same dreary uniformity in other cities: "It was hard to imagine a black general named Othello living in Venice now," despite all the Senegalese selling trinkets near the Grand Canal...
Pips & Crowns. Richard Ennis, with serious war in Dunkirk and Crete behind him, has been posted to the Rock. He is a foul-up sergeant in the Army Vocational and Cultural Corps, lecturing to monoglot Italian P.O.W.s, illiterate dockers and military no-hope types who are detailed to educational "parades" because nothing useful can be found for them to do. The Rock is not designed to sustain human life; it is a "chunk of strategic geology." It has escaped Axis capture only because-the bitter story goes-an American insurance company did not want its corporate symbol compromised. The Rock...
...Communist nations expropriated the language of Tolstoy and Confucius, and interpreters are available. But who will interpret the language of Marxism, which presents problems more complex than the conjugation of a Russian verb or the tonal inflections of Mandarin? That many-splendored monolith, world Communism, is, in fact, a monoglot, whatever national form its utterance takes; it aspires to give a new frame for human thought...
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