Word: polyglots
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...habla espanol -- English only spoken here. When it comes to language, however, Californians showed little tolerance for speaking in foreign tongues. In polyglot California, where Spanish is practically a necessity and Korean is not a rarity, voters passed a measure making English the "official" language. Many saw the vote as a sign of xenophobia. Larry Berg, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California, describes the vote as reflecting "no-nothing, nativist resentment toward this massive influx of people." But former Senator S.I. Hayakawa, a formidable semanticist who led the crusade, promised it was not meant...
...pursue pie in the sky just doesn't make sense. They should have asked Gorbachev to clarify what restrictions he was asking for on SDI. Under the ABM treaty, for example, you can test exotic technologies from ground test sites. It doesn't seem to me that with that polyglot collection of advisers you could get fully prepared for the summit. You've got to sort out the views in advance and not have a town-hall debate in Reykjavik...
...course, but adapt and rework them in a sort of hybridization variously known as Franglais, Spanglish or Japlish. The Germans, who have traditionally enjoyed concocting exotic combinations like Satisfaktionsfahigkei t (the state of being socially eligible to fight a duel), now add English to German as though creating a polyglot strudel. Powerstimmung, for example, means a great mood, which can make a German ganz high or even ausgeflippt...
...America by boat from Naples. They had little money and no English. Mario, their fourth and final child, was born in the urban equivalent of a log cabin, the room behind his father's grocery store. Cuomo has turned his early life into a sepia-tinted parable of a polyglot neighborhood of hard work and love. He can spin out stories about everyone on the old block: Lanzone, the baker; Kaye, the Jewish tailor; Kelly, the Irish scrap dealer...
...arguing New York ethnics who swirl around his android WASP heroes like flies around a honeycomb. Lyne, in his indominatable style, means to make fun of the Chinese, Blacks, and Italians who blithely live on the surface world of lowtech New York. But the seemingly irrelevant visions of a polyglot urban landscape only serve to underscore the irrelevance and emptiness of Rourke and Basinger's protagonists...