Word: polyglot
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...clichés. The events of the last Bourbon monarch are not dramatized, merely alluded to. Oh, all right, Schwartzman's Louis XVI says at a meeting of his ministers, raise taxes; send troops to America. The intonations, especially of the American actors, are uninflected, perfunctory. And with the polyglot ensemble of actors speaking English in American, British, French and Italian accents, the film has the feeling of the original sound track of one of those European co-productions before the Babel of voices was dubbed into a single coherent vocal style. Though this may accurately reflect the cacophony...
...anyway, as the tangled logistics could well push the start back into June, when the summer recess of Congress would deprive them of "Pharaoh" rulers to plague. Young proposed to make constructive use of delay, and questioned the enormous effort to assemble and maintain a novel protest army of polyglot poor people in Washington. He doubted King's white attorney and closest confidant Stanley Levison's analogy with the Bonus Marchers of 1932-34, whose suffering and rejection had kindled delayed support for New Deal initiatives, and King aide James Bevel renewed his attack on the entire calculation. "Aw, that...
...crime was a toddler who had not yet mastered standard speech. The story's amateur detective was a philologist who unmasked the criminal when he cracked the child's babbled code. Carkeet's next novel, The Greatest Slump of All Time, told of a major league baseball team whose polyglot members one by one lapsed into clinical depression. Although they kept winning, they doubted the value of victory when it failed to make them happy, and found themselves facing mid-life moral crises while still in the first flush of youth...
Yugoslav Communism has been plagued by a Balkan variant of Murphy's Law ("if anything can go wrong, it will"). Local empire building is rampant, a practice that is amplified by Yugoslavia's strongly regional nature. The polyglot nation consists of six republics and two autonomous provinces, meaning that in each area regional bureaucrats have competing, equally wasteful strategies...
Stumpf wants the best parts of childhood made available again, the mixture of surprise and ritual, comfort and wonder. Images of his own youth in a polyglot St. Louis neighborhood pop up again and again in his conversations about design. "I used to crawl behind the radio," says Stumpf, son and grandson of engineers, "and stare at the tubes." Almost every machine, he says, is at some level a toy. "The concept of jauntiness is a quality lost completely in design. It is a wonderful quality. The horse and buggy had it." By jaunty he does not mean arch...