Word: polyglots
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This image, of a frail, gravely serene, utterly courageous creature of the past, transporting across the immediate ruin of the human present the innocent and polyglot future, has exciting possibilities both for tear-jerking and for simple grandeur. Nevil Shute's modest abilities are at least honest and competent enough to make it a good story...
...since the Crusades had the Near East seen such a polyglot host. Besides the Glubb-led Arabs, General Wilson had in his supporting cast British and Scottish regulars, Anzacs, Canadians, Indians (mostly Sikhs and Gurkhas) and Free French. Senegalese, Annamites, Algerians, Moroccans and Lebanese, in addition to Vichy-loyal French regulars, helped General Dentz furnish the present production's conflict...
Damascus was too Oriental for gayety, but not for long. Isabel instituted polyglot Wednesday receptions-"there were thirty-six races and creeds and tongues." Dressed as a Moslem woman, she frequented the bazaars and harems. Their great friends were Abd-el-Kadir, an almost legendary chieftain who had held out for 15 years against the French, and Jane Digby El Mezrab, the Mabel Dodge Luhan of her time. The four of them used to have ritual evening meals on the roof, "and after that we would smoke our narghilehs and talk and talk and talk far into the night...
...Polyglot Decca, which prides itself on being the Thomas Cook & Sons of popular music, takes especial pride in its Mexican list, and well it might. Mexican popular music is like Mexico itself: vivid, varied, unpredictable, exciting. It comes in many forms. There are many kinds of canciones (songs): fox (fox trot), ranchero (cowboy), bolero (slow rumba), corrido (fast one-step), etc. There are also polkas and a number of varieties of locality songs and dances. Their general characteristic is ingeniously broken time...
...along the Whangpoo River, where the Occident meshes with China, is the biggest, toughest, richest big-city badlands in the world. Kidnappings, bombings, murders are the small change of its life, and a holdup man can rent a gun from a policeman for $2.50. This Shanghai has its own polyglot dynasty of gangsters, gamblers, pimps, racketeers...