Word: slurs
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Richard Backus, as the king of France, looks much too young but has an impressive and resonant voice. If only he took care not to slur phrases and to avoid the Shakespearean sing-song jog that it is so easy to fall into...
...close." Despite the disappearance of the old ethnic comedy, though, some sub rosa jokes still thrive, on the assumption that only a really minor minority lacks the strength to fight or picket. The current favorite is the Polish joke, which ranges from harmless slap to unpleasant slur: Q. Why are there so few Polish suicides? A. It's not easy to get killed jumping from a basement apartment." The one subject that is strictly taboo right now is Viet Nam, says Jonathan Winters. Not that he need travel that far; Winters gets his laughs from way-out exaggerations...
Regional speech patterns vary, but many Negroes-and whites living in similar circumstances of cultural isolation-speak a nonstandard English (linguists call it "dialectolalia") with common characteristics. They may slur words as in "sawrat" (it's all right), "sisfirshear" (it's his first year) and "smothertam" (some other time). The sounds of f and r may be dropped as "hep yo sef" or "sistah." The th sound turns to f: "bofe" for both. Errant grammar includes "he be absent," "he do," "my mother, she done gone...
...slur on my firm!" cried Herbert Hill. "We will get Mr. Wilson by the ears before long." It took more than a year, but Hill's Hardy Spicer, Ltd., car-parts manufacturing company in Birmingham, did at least get Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson, 49, by the tongue a bit. Wilson's counsel appeared in London's High Court of Justice to deliver a handsome apology from the Prime Minister after he was charged with "libeling and slandering" Hill during the 1964 general elections campaign by suggesting that the Hardy Spicer management had fomented...
...Married Woman was recommended for banning by France's Commission de la Censure. Much of its footage consists of couples in bed with no clothes on. But what turned out to be worrying the Commission was not nudity but an implied slur on the grandeur of French domesticity; the ban was rescinded when the article in the title was changed from The to A, no longer implying that the adulterous lady in question was typical of women in France. And anyway, those naked bodies in bed are about as sexy as an illustrated lecture on dermatology−lots...