Word: syntax
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Iowa is concerned about law and order. Stanley stresses law enforcement, "including civil rights laws," while Hughes underlines justice as a prerequisite. Nevertheless, lowans like their Governor's forthright ways, and this works in Hughes' favor. "I mainly talk from my gut," says Hughes. His often ragged syntax bears witness to a formal education that ended after a year of college, and he can cuss like a teamster. Once, local legend has it, he convened a meeting with the words: "All right, you sons of bitches, let's pray." He can also speak with a fervor honed...
Graves is plain where FitzGerald is prettified, philosophic where FitzGerald is sententious. His austere tone evokes a more troubled, yearning Omar whose tippling is a metaphor for religious mysticism. Yet, surprisingly for a poet of his skill and grace, Graves often lapses into ungainly syntax, primly avoids rhymes, and altogether misses the colorful, melodious murmur that so entrances the ear and emotions in FitzGerald. He may be deliberately exercising his classical restraint or making an overzealous try for accuracy. In any case, he stiffens the flow of the poem. Here is one of FitzGerald's best-known quatrains...
...LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN, by Grace Paley. In this reissue of a 1959 collection of stories, ordinary lives become extraordinary when told in the author's artfully supple, salty syntax...
...source of the book's vitality is its language-supple and colloquial, yet framed in the syntax of surprise. The syncopated speech patterns constantly shift away from familiar formulations. In An Interest in Life, a deserted mother observes: a woman "gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, or she could just die of the pleasure. But men are different, they have to own money, men must do well in the world. I know that men are not fooled by being happy...
...establishment of middle-class British values on a boat in the jungle must have interested both Agee and Collier as script-writers; the published screenplay in Agee On Film lavishes detail on Cockney inflection and deliberately tortured syntax. Here, Huston's casting defeats the intent: however much Bogart accentuates his buck teeth, he is largely out of place as a Cockney mechanic; his best moments are asides and wisecracks reminiscent of the two Hawks films, The Big Sleep and To Have And Have Not, and he must rely heavily on a stylized comedy technique borrowed wholesale from vintage Cary Grant...