Word: singulars
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...place of these "obsolete" ideas Rainer suggested "neutral performance," "task-like activity," and "singular action," concepts, embodied in Terrain (1963), Part of Some Sextets (1965), and The Mind is a Muscle (1966). At this time Rainer aimed at a movement style combining "the coordination of a pro and the non-definition of an amateur." She put together large, rambling structures, often according to random game rules, and relying on repetition and interruption. She considered a viewer's comment, "But she walks as though she's in the street," a compliment...
Making It. Benjamin West (1738-1820) was the first to go. He went to Italy and then to London, where he became court painter to George III. That a colonial could bring off such a feat was regarded as singular. It turned him into a precocious father figure for later Yankee expatriates, notably Copley and Stuart. Here was their lesson in making it: the teen-age limner who, thanks to Rome and practical ambition, rose to become the second president of the Royal Academy. In fact, West was by temperament an ideal official artist: studious, methodical, competent, a bovine draftsman...
...acts are the free acts of a man who dances his existence upon the abyss of nothingness. Today the notion that only the crazy are sane in a world gone mad would hardly rattle an espresso cup. It was not so in Sabatini's time. By a singular stroke of intuition, he created an existentialist hero almost a decade before Jean-Paul Sartre raised the banner of existentialism...
...might not Hamlet some day be forced to say "What a piece of work is people!") They predictably bridle at "he" or "his" used as pronouns when the sex of the antecedent is unspecified (everyone will get his comeuppance). The plural pronouns "they" and "their," they suggest, could become singular, unisex pronouns. Purists will howl, but the usage (everyone will get their comeuppance) is already lamentably widespread...
...cover actuality live, from beginning to end. Sometimes, though, the results are not quite what was planned. The Public Broadcasting Service's soup-to-nuts (or, more accurately, lobster-to-mints) coverage of last week's White House dinner for Queen Elizabeth allowed the average American a singular opportunity to feel for himself the exquisite pain of the pointless state occasion, an agony of boredom heretofore reserved for the powerful and the well born. There was perhaps something salutary about the 4½ -hour experience but it is doubtful that any sane soul would care to repeat...