Word: spiel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...other 11 months, carrying out, as ever, her inevitable business. Explore her infinity on your own, put your own ear to her breast, then hear her internal rumblings. You must slow yourself down, not rush through on Gray-Line sightseeing tours, inundated by some puerile spiel. "Man," wrote Jon Hendricks in a jazz poem to Manhattan, "if you can't make it in N.Y. City you can't make it nowhere .... I wrote the shortest jazz poem you ever heard. Nothin' 'bout huggin' and kissin'; one word: Listen...
...funny in a way, particularly since the white Mississippian will nod his head zealously through about two-thirds of the spiel, until he gets the point. Slack-jawed indignation ensues. I am afraid, though, that you have ruined my sardonic joke. I got half way through your cover story before nausea overtook me, and it occurred to me that blind barbarism-in the Congo, in Mississippi-is the one citadel that will not tumble before mockery...
Among the commonest ills of man, ranking close to constipation and headaches, is the wide range of supposed digestive upsets mistakenly described as "acid indigestion." Every day, millions of Americans complain of "heartburn" or "sour stomach." TV commercials spiel endlessly about "acid upset." Some sufferers try to dignify their complaints with such technical terms as hyperacidity and acidosis. By whatever name, the problem is a high-up bellyache, and those who suffer from it in the U.S. lay out $90 million each year for antacids and alkalizers...
...London store where his father is a department manager. His parents provide him with a bowler, a pinstripe, suit that conceals his bowlegs, nylon underwear that crackles when he walks, and a small "pied a terre" (or, foot in the grave) in Kensington. He learns the sales spiel handily enough ("A beautiful shoe, madam, seamless uppers, a discreet buckle and a soft dimple toe, and for a foot like yours with so little adhesion between the phalanges of the toe and the metatarsal joint . . ."), but he is desperately unhappy. Bernard has no friends. He burns with hopeless, timid lusts...
Phillips' low-keyed prose does not match the stately measures of King James's scholars for beauty, but more than compensates by often making clear what they had transliterated word for word from the Hebrew. The King James Version makes Amos 4:6 sound like a fluoridation spiel, translating it: "And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities." Phillips recaptures the original sense with his phrasing: "It was I who gave you hungry mouths in all your cities." And in Micah 6:16, where the King James has the Lord meaninglessly warning "that...