Word: syntax
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FEMINISM IS TAUGHT in a few classes at Harvard, in which students read French theorists like Helene Cixous and Luce lrigaray and discuss such issues as androgyny, female-female bonding, and patriarchally defined syntax. But when I took an informal poll in a room full of guys the other day--"What do you think of when you hear the word `feminist'?"--the first response was, "Holly Near aiming a pair of pruning shears at my crotch...
More puzzling and complicated than language is the American social syntax. The first impression is one of dazzling and rather unsettling informality, an indiscriminate camaraderie. But one learns that going to the opera in shirt- sleeves (an outrage, surely!) does not mean contempt for culture or even necessarily a lack of rules. Calling the boss by his first name, which takes some effort, does not mean that he and the office boy are equals. Indeed, equality is both the great illusion and the great reality of America. The immigrant is slow to understand that below the egalitarian surface there...
...Romantics but they are significant because their ideas do project the country that impressed their minds. Lonsdale's will be a controversial book because he gives so much credence (and space) to rough hewn versifyers. Yet those willing to excuse slightly less than heroic couplets, and some jarring syntax will enjoy many agreeable hours of reading about people living in an age of transition
...would not attempt to speak like them because "I would never massacrate their language." And an organizer of the event said he liked it better this year than last because there were "more people and a better chance to conjugate." After awhile, the inebriated ear grows accustomed to tortured syntax, and all linguistic motor skills begin to dissipate. And the band plays...
...ranch, he looks rangy and hale, an ageless cowboy. On a podium with waving flags and floating balloons, he can mesmerize and uplift. But when he speaks extemporaneously, the effect can be more halting than inspirational. He has long been notorious for bungling facts. He often mangles syntax. Somehow, with a quip or a smile, he usually manages to fight free of his verbal tangles, leaving listeners only uneasy, not alarmed...