Word: sheerly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...diversity human tongues and the linguistic theories that account for them. (Unlike many of the critics, he finds American English now in a state of acquisitive brilliance but also of instability ") Novelist Walker Percy, in a book of essays called The Message in the Bottle, splendidly analyzes the sheer strangeness of language as a phenomenon-an exchange of mental fire that obeys no physical laws but has its origins in some miraculous gift of comprehension and self-awareness, a gift as spontaneous and awesome as Helen Keller's discovering the physical fact of water and the word for water...
...wretched thing for an artist to leave his homeland and his native sounds, whether musical or verbal. Perhaps because Shostakovich had to bend his inspiration to the will of the state, the quality of his work varies widely. There are, however, his passages of genuine beauty, crisp wit and sheer energy of genius. For those, it is impossible to name a successor...
...nine inhabited islands of the Azores archipelago (pop. 300,000) look like a setting for a Graham Greene novel. Sheer rocky cliffs drop abruptly to the Atlantic, while the lush, subtropical countryside spreads out in a crazy quilt of farm plots separated by rock fences. Late each day, young and old alike gather under plane trees in the colorful town squares to catch a little relief from the heat and oppressive humidity, and to talk...
...that the team can concentrate on playing long enough to win a game, let alone three world championships. There is often anarchy in the clubhouse, with players in an uproar about Finley or, in a spillover of antagonism, battling each other. That they still win is a tribute to sheer skill and unshakable self-confidence. "We win because we have guys who love the challenge," says Bando. "We have a nucleus of gutsy players who don't know how to lose...
...this is not sheer madness. It is Sequenza III for female voice by Luciano Berio, one of the three or four most successful living composers. The words are incomprehensible, as the music also, seems to be, but as a dramatic stream of consciousness, this piece has the same kind of compelling emotional logic as Joyce's Ulysses...