Word: syntax
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cleverness is, however, limited and his sick humor soon become tiresome. Mutilation of words and syntax, here admittedly meaningless, can be amusing. In this book it seems too contrived and heavy handed. Beatle meaninglessness was hilarious in A Hard Day's Night--that title itself means nothing. But the concentrated dose of it in Lennon's volume is too much. He goes on and on, throwing around words growing less imaginative...
...Wendy and Me, George Burns is the owner of a Los Angeles apartment building where he acts as chorus and narrator of a running story about his tenants, centering on the nutty wife of an airline pilot. She speaks in a kind of implosive syntax. "I didn't want you to think I was out when I was gone," she reassured her husband last week. "I always want you to know where I am even when we're together." Sadly, the fictional Wendy (played by Connie Stevens) recalls the late Gracie Allen, who died in August. There...
Lyndon Johnson is the hardest-working presidential tale spinner since Abraham Lincoln. Some of his yarns are long and tangled and full of Johnson's long-winded Texas syntax. Some are funny, some are pithy, and as often as not they are used to draw an Aesopian moral or to make a contemporary point. Some examples...
Most art brut bears a primordial stamp, but Samant's is sophisticated; his indecipherable scribbles speak to man deeper than the syntax of known language. To Samant, they tell of his own introspection: "It is as if I have walls around me." Yet he speaks to the world through their painterly surfaces, and centuries echo musically off them...
Linguistic Ellis Island. In the 17th century, France "purified" its language, striving for utmost clarity and "incorruptible" syntax. "What is not clear is not French," boasted an 18th century linguist. Etiemble thus argues that Franglais may cause disastrous misunderstandings...