Word: sprezzatura
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...question at least as old as moody Danes delivering English couplets. And every year, as summer approaches, we face the same dilemma: whether to try, when in Rome, to speak as the Romans do or to rely on Italian cabbies speaking English (with brio, no doubt, and sprezzatura). In some respects, it comes down to a question of whether 'tis better to give or to receive linguistic torture. The treachery of the phrase book, as every neophyte soon discovers, is that you cannot begin to follow the answer to the question you've pronounced so beautifully -- and, worse still, your...
...efforts over the past 20 years have restored some lost dignity to the idea of amateurism. Master of several trades but jack of none, he has been student of philosophy, mathematics and architecture, painter, photographer, editor, writer and sculptor, and done it all with a degree of sprezzatura, that peculiar term by which the 15th century Florentines conveyed their praise of a natural and serious grace of action. What Baudelaire wrote on dandyism a century ago is almost exactly true of the virtues of Liberman's art and its expressive limitations: "The distinguishing characteristic of the dandy...
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