Word: polyglotting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Dorothy Parker wanted to call her (unwritten) autobiography Mongrel, presumably reflecting her Wasp-Jewish heritage. Douglas applies the word to the polyglot nature of the new culture, which was profoundly influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. Writers like Langston Hughes who settled in and around Strivers Row in Upper Manhattan gave distinctive voice to the aspirations of American blacks. "Aframerican" musicians like Duke Ellington entertained white audiences at Harlem's Cotton Club with an exotic new idiom, jazz, that became one of America's enduring gifts to the world...
...most diverse of Cambridge's 13 neighborhoods, Area Four has the city's largest concentrations of Blacks and Hispanics. The neighborhood is a true polyglot; the language spoken on the street is more likely to be Haitian Creole, Spanish or Portuguese that English...
...ways that were hardly conceivable even a generation ago, the new world order is a version of the New World writ large: a wide-open frontier of polyglot terms and postnational trends. A common multiculturalism links us all -- call it Planet Hollywood, Planet Reebok or the United Colors of Benetton. Taxi and hotel and disco are universal terms now, but so too are karaoke and yoga and pizza. For the gourmet alone, there is tiramisu at the Burger King in Kyoto, echt angel-hair pasta in Saigon and enchiladas on every menu in Nepal...
Meanwhile, Clinton has yet to decide whether deficits matter. For months, his polyglot economic team has differed over the wisdom of stimulating the economy through tax cuts or increased spending at the price of boosting the federal deficit and driving up long-term interest rates. The deficit hawks -- more conservative by nature -- want the long-term considerations to predominate. The deficit doves -- typically more liberal -- say it can wait. In recent weeks there is a growing consensus between the two groups that the markets might support a $30 billion-to-$50 billion one-shot stimulus if it is paired with...
...arrival on the world scene; the French Jacobins even redid the months of the calendar. But the communists carried the process to extremes, both to honor their heroes and to Russify the hard-to-pronounce appellations of the territories, like Georgia and Central Asia, that they added to their polyglot empire. Thus, the ancient Azerbaijani trading city of Gyandzha became Kirovabad to honor Sergei Kirov (he got a ballet company too), who headed the Communist Party in the republic in the 1920s. Nizhni Novgorod was renamed Gorky, for the chronicler of the working class, Maxim...