Word: plurality
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...String Quartet No. 2, winner of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize, Carter stationed each musician in a different quarter of the stage. That arrangement produced a musical conversation almost Joycean in its plural textures. At one point in his 1970 Concerto for Orchestra, Carter wrote different music for each member of the cello section, causing even more cacophonous grumbling among the musicians than among their instruments...
...Yorker cartoons without pictures? Indeed, nearly all the stories first appeared in that magazine. At times Barthelme even dabbles in the first-person plural as if he were spoofing the "We" of The Talk of the Town. Only once does he break tone and give a hint of the robust tall-tale telling of his native Texas. He describes his grandfather, who, with good looks and a bottle of Teamster's Early Grave, convinced a conservation-minded wood nymph to transform herself "into one million board feet of one-by-ten of the very poorest quality neatly stacked...
Viet Nam is a plural society, whose regional, ethnic and religious differences are now widely recognized. But there is another sense in which there are at least four South Viet Nams, each of them present in every geographical region and in almost every province. The first consists of the urban population, which is now perhaps 40 percent of the total and which lives under more or less continuing control by the Government. The other three South Viet Nams divide the rural population in approximately equal shares: the rural communal population, roughly 20 percent of the total, who belong...
...information, lends to be less frequent, and always means exactly what it says. The less marked member carries less information, since it can be used ambiguously or as a cover term for both, tends to be the more frequent, and can be substituted for the marked member. Thus the plural is more marked than the singular, since, for example, the singular can be used for plural reference (many a horse horse-thief), but not the other way around. Markedness is one of the fundamental principles which govern the organization of the internal economics of all human languages...
...last thing we need. Furthermore, no man can sexually satisfy more than one woman, while one woman can sexually satisfy several men. Things should be reversed-one woman with several husbands. The advantages would be obvious: there would be a big reduction in the number of births; the plural husbands would be able to support one wife in real style; the children would have more protection; and the wife and husbands would be sexually satisfied...