Word: saxonizes
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...read Beowulf," Woody Allen advised Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977). The throwaway line elicited laughs from Allen's core audience of college grads, especially the one-time English majors among them who had learned to dread--if not actually read--what they had heard was a grim Anglo-Saxon epic filled with odd names and a lot of gory hewing and hacking...
...marvelous language that Heaney has found to set this old warhorse of a saga running again. All translations, especially of poetry, involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows these rules to the letter in such lines...
...preface, Heaney acknowledges the irony of a Celtic poet's attempting to revivify an Anglo-Saxon poem. When younger, he notes, "I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/ands." But this notion faded the deeper he got into his translation. Digging, delving into the loam of language, has been a central metaphor throughout his poetic career. (His most recent selection is titled Opened Ground.) What Heaney has brought to the surface with his Beowulf is an old and newly burnished treasure...
...called the name of Lisa Marie Presley's fiance, John Oszajca, "unpronounceable" [PEOPLE, Feb. 14]. But if 40 million people can pronounce the name Oszajca correctly, why can't you? Please don't let your Anglo-Saxon bias impair your ability to pronounce Slavic names, especially Polish ones. Not being able to pronounce a name correctly denigrates and debases not only its bearer but also the country of its origin. Ethnocentricity isn't funny in our rapidly shrinking global village. We all need to make the effort to pronounce names correctly and not make fun of them. Because, frankly...
...Henry Stimson, who served as both Secretary of State and Secretary of War, they were publicity-averse men who were more powerful than famous. A sociologist who was very much a born-in member of this class, E. Digby Baltzell, bestowed two resonant names on its members: white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (Wasps) and the Protestant establishment. In historic terms, they were the gentlemanly replacements, in the American pilot's cabin, for the robber barons who emerged during the capitalist boom after the Civil...