Word: phrase
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...lapse into a daydream about former Arizona Wildcats shooting guard and college basketball star Miles Simon. You know the expression “don’t let your imagination get the best of you”? It’s a funny one. Erroneous interpretations of reality, the phrase suggests, proclivities for the idealized or the fictitious, can threaten our safety, happiness, or otherwise get the best of us. Take, for example, if at this very meal I had foreseen myself a champion eater and ingested 150 popcorn shrimp. Bad idea. But here is the beauty of writing...
...demonstrators were dozens of young men outfitted with fake suicide belts, like those worn for "martyrdom operations" of the type radical Palestinians have carried out repeatedly against Israeli civilians. Other protesters carried placards with hate speech, some of which seemed to have been freshly painted to parrot Ahmadinejad's phrase...
...demonstrators were dozens of young men outfitted with fake suicide belts, like those worn for "martyrdom operations" of the type radical Palestinians have carried out repeatedly against Israeli civilians. Other protesters carried placards with hate speech, some of which seemed to have been freshly painted to parrot Ahmadinejad's phrase...
...records. Perhaps because of Berman’s strange proclivities, the Silver Jews have never achieved the (comparative) popularity of some of their alt-country contemporaries: Wilco and Ryan Adams especially. Berman savors the absurd, and his songs abound with bizarre characterizations and nonsensical turns of phrase. Berman’s genius is his ability to invest these caricatures with pathos and existential import: the freaks and geeks that populate Berman songs are transformed into emblems of desire and resignation. The band’s new album “Tanglewood Numbers” invokes such lyrical oddities...
...this and other poems, Robinson’s syntax is the best part of her style. The pacing of her language is exquisite. Lines that are formal and decorously slow contrast with punctuation-less lines that rush into one another. Robinson can sustain the tension of a phrase over several lines, even through self-interruption. In “From this miserable mutineer a stutter, / for when we are reading Dostoevsky in caves,” the narrator starts to grandly exclaim “My—” but breaks it with a wistful aside...