Word: singsonging
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...hear Professor Langer on "Italy and the Revolution of 1820." He never misses a chance to hear the Great Young Man of the Department of History. Down in front, pencil in hand, sits the Vagabond as Mr. Langer mounts the platform to begin his lecture in the grating singsong voice that that startles you at first--and then picks you up and carries you along on a flood of fact, anecdote, opinion; now amusing, now perplexing, but continually and relentlessly stimulating...
...oneself. Mr. Caldwell's stylistic devices are, though effective, simple rather than subtle. As in all his earlier books, there are paragraphs in this latest collection which could be broken up into regular metrical lines. Reading aloud the first story, "Candy-Man Beechum," with its rhythms which invite a singsong intonation and its refrain-like repetitions and variations of phrase, one gains much the same impression as from a Vachel Lindsay chant. There is, besides, the method familiar since Hemingway of crowding together important and unimportant things without emphasis or subordination...
Good shots in The Battle's battle: white uniforms on the bridge flapping against a grey sky in what seems to be a mingled whine of wind and speeding turbines; the commander getting the enemy's range again & again in his finder, announcing it in a flat singsong; one gun turret after another reporting "Ready"; a lone survivor in one gun turret groping to the telephone for instructions; sailors, protected by masks and helmets, staggering about in fume-filled turrets, loading the guns (see cut, p. 44). The battle is bitter and bloody. When it is over...
...Manhattan one afternoon last week, a dark-skinned crickety little man jumped from a taxi into a Broadway barber shop, had himself shaved, dashed for his office, summoned a stenographer and in a plaintive singsong voice dictated a dozen lines of verse. He read them over ruefully as he paced the floor. His subject was old songs and he was worried for fear it would sound conceited...
...long tin shed. On its floor piles and piles of brown leaves, rows and rows of piles. Down the long rows slowly moves an auctioneer chanting numbers, numbers and more numbers, singsong fashion. Behind him trail the buyers. Every eight, ten. fifteen seconds comes the only refrain that breaks the monotony of the chant: "Sold to this company" or "Sold to that." Thus every autumn since before the Civil War the U. S. tobacco crop has gone to market. Last week, however, singing auctioneers were silenced in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina...