Word: polyglotting
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Growing up in Panama City, Blades listened to a polyglot hit parade that included singer Frankie Lymon, as well as Elvis Presley, the Platters and the Beatles. Following in the footsteps of his conga-playing father, Blades started singing with local Afro-Cuban bands. He enrolled in law school at the University of Panama, "to please my parents," and passed the bar. But a short visit to New York City left the young attorney torn between the courtroom and the recording studio. The final verdict favored music, and by 1974 Blades was back in Manhattan for good. "This...
...earth mother, was given to romping naked with the pack of family dogs -- "a Lady Godiva with a pitch-black mane," whose fierce nurturing exuberance was in utmost contrast to the coddling anxieties of a beautiful, irascible Viennese mother. Mama believed she had gone below < her station in the polyglot provinces of the Bukovina. Father was sexually unfaithful to her and volcanic in temper; an anti-Semite who despised Nazis as Untermenschen; a watercolorist, photographer and architectural historian whose diversions included dragging a dead wild boar through the hall and up the stairs in the course of a soiree. Above...
...Francisco with its 400,000 souls was the undisputed gem of the Pacific Coast, a bustling, pungent, polyglot city enjoying corrupt government, splendid libraries and wonderful restaurants. As a hub of international finance and society, it rivaled New York City and Paris, and it took perverse pride in its reputation, well earned by the depravity of the carnal Barbary Coast, as "the wickedest city in the world." The evening of April 17, when the nonpareil Enrico Caruso sang in Carmen at the Grand Opera House before repairing to the fabulous Palace Hotel (a telephone and bath for every room...
...Trinidad. A member of neither the white ruling class nor the black majority, he was part of the island's large, self-contained Indian community. As a child, he lived a Hindu village life in the country. In Port- of-Spain during World War II, he experienced a polyglot street life that included the language of American G.I.s. Later, as a scholarship student at Oxford, the accents were more refined, but the sense of being a colonial was even stronger...
Then flag down an astonished cabbie ("White people!" his face says) and go back through Sugar Hill to 145th Street and Broadway. The character of this area, with its many Dominican immigrants, is raffish and polyglot. One store, the House of Talisman, is downright polytheistic. In the window of this religious-goods mart, wooden Indians rub elbows with statues of the Madonna and an ebony St. Martin of Tours; inside, Holy Seven Spiritual Good Luck Bath Oil and the ever reliable Gamblers Drops are for sale. Next door is a nice place for early dinner: Copeland's, which speaks...