Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plot is by far the easiest part of the book to follow: a man, dubbed Blue but really named Serge Gavotte (which is but the first of a myriad of musical jokes) begins a journey across America in search of the perfect musical phrase. Accompanied by his balding wife and their child Zimmerman, Blue and his family participate in a ribald series of escapades as they make their way westward towards California--for where else could the perfect phrase be found? Each place they travel through and everyone they meet cleverly parodies the familiar stock and trade characters from modern...
...Yanks are coming with cameras and phrase books and something new: pocket calculators, which have become essential for translating the volatile currencies of Europe into dollars. The dollar, as everyone knows, has never been lustier abroad,* and Americans are in the mood to spend. To encourage them, European Travel Commission ads across the U.S. proclaim: EUROPE! THE GRANDEST HOLIDAY OF ALL. NOW MORE AFFORDABLE THAN EVER. The Paris daily Le Figaro scolds the mother country for not wooing the American dollar more actively this summer and urges with a wiggle: "The objective in 1984 is to seduce the Americans...
...eight pocket guides (Simon & Schuster; $7.95 each), detailed, small-print tours of cities and regions. The excellent volume on Rome includes history, sights, even ice cream shops. These minis are handy, although the profusion of tiny symbols can be confusing. Berlitz, in addition to its well-thumbed series of phrase books publishes city guides ($4.95) to sightseeing and activities, but do not look here for hotel or restaurant recommendations...
...play no instruments. The hundreds of thousands of U.S. fans typically are Hispanic junior high schoolers, like the heartthrobs themselves: five Puerto Rican boys, ages 13 to 15. And menudo, which means "small change" in Spanish, is not really a band or even, to use the '60s phrase, a combo. It is a clever marketing idea: the boys are mere employees of a promoter who replaces each one before he turns 16. "Menudo is a formula, and we must take care not to break it," says Edgardo Díaz, 31, Menudo's inventor and honcho, who manages...
...work lacks the tragic dimension of Heilbut's book. The difference is evident in the titles. It is one thing to be a stranger and quite another to be an exile, forced from a country, a tradition and a language, to become, in Einstein's phrase, "a bird of passage for . . . life...