Word: pidgin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...into the White Rose Tavern on Whitehall Street. Almost everyone in the bar was too busy watching the World Series on TV to help. When a ship's cook named Brian Quinn finally gave him a hand, Jaanimets figured he had found a friend. In a mixture of pidgin English, Russian and Estonian, Jaanimets got his message across: he was an Estonian sailor who did not want to go back to Russia. Quinn, who has a couple of Estonian friends, knew what to do. He called the Estonia Relief Committee, let Jaanimets talk on the phone to someone...
...trouble is that Author Brown, noted for a good World War II novel, A Walk in the Sun, seems to have lost faith in his audience. Lest the reader miss the parallels, he tells his tale in the pidgin poetry of the conventional translator. What he has set out to do, says the author, is tell of "a yellow Sunday in the last days of a good spring, while . . . pale threads, drawn out from dark hidden places, began to be wound inexorably together . . . until there had been wrought, out of such tenuous white and fleeting things, a taut tripwire...
...this is, more or less, the story of a fellah who once lived in the Cairo slum of Attarine, is now at Chez Maxim's (where Bandleader Azzam himself hit the big time), and adores his girl "like tomato sauce" (salsa del pommodore in Azzam's pidgin Italian). But the words do not matter. They merely complement the international melody, which tinkles like goat bells near the White Nile and clicks like the heels of an Andalusian gypsy. Scored by Azzam for bongos, flute, tambourine, echo chamber and his own voice, Mustapha is adapted from an Egyptian student...
Brown shoulders swayed and laughter filled the night as this simple tale in pidgin English wafted last week from the screen of one of Nigeria's 45 open-air cinemas. A commercial for Barclays Bank of England, written in the local "High Life" beat, the short cartoon has become so popular among West Africans that it vies for equal billing with ancient Tom Mix westerns and Charlie Chaplin slapsticks. It also pleases Barclays: savings accounts have almost quadrupled since it started showing the film. Says Barclays' Advertising Manager Kenneth J. Lashmar...
...worst of the new massacres took place in a sprawling (pop. 15,000) community called Dschang. While the tiny French African garrison slept, a band of young Bamiléké tribesmen came marching down the dirt road singing their own pidgin French words to the tune of John Brown's Body. At the outskirts of town they split up into three gangs, and as they made their way down the streets, they began to swing their razor-sharp pangas with a kind of dazed abandon. They burned down 20 houses whose families had been trapped inside, slashed...