Word: syntax
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...smooth out his jumbled syntax, Kennedy's staff has put together thick black briefing binders filled with direct, simple answers to questions that may arise. "I feel more comfortable on the podium now," says Kennedy and indeed he sometimes strikes a certain rhythm in his basic stump speech that can rouse an audience. "What we have now is not a malaise among the American people, but a malaise in the highest levels of leadership," he booms, slashing the air with one hand and flipping large note cards with the other. "A can't-do President...
Idioglossia is a phenomenon, badly documented at best, in which two individuals, often twins, develop a unique and private language with highly original vocabulary and syntax. It is commonly confused with a subcategory, "twin speech," a private collection of distorted words and idioms used by 40% of twins because they feel lonely or playful or both. Twins usually give it up at age three. But Gracie and Ginny were discovered at six, still unable to speak English. They had an apparent vocabulary of hundreds of exotic words stuck together in Rube Goldberg sentence structures and salted with strange half-English...
DIED. Theodore M. Bernstein, 74, former assistant managing editor of the New York Times, who served as the paper's prose polisher and syntax surgeon for almost five decades, authoring seven popular texts on English usage and journalism; of cancer; in New York City. In a witty Times house organ called Winners & Sinners, the shirtsleeves vigilante caught solecists in the act and fended off such encroaching verbal vices as the politician's "windy-foggery," Madison Avenue's "addiction" and faddish "hot-rod writing...
...point of his career was in the 1940s. He decided, in a mood of perversity, to paint "modern art" -pictures full of impressionist fuzz and expressionist slather. The Gorgon, 1943, a wretched parody of Monet applied to a surrealist syntax, may be the least inept of these. If anything, they showed how far Magritte's real gifts lay from the orthodox processes of modernism. Nor did his first essays in the surrealist manner, done in 1925-26, indicate much about the artist to come; they are, for the most part, grab bags of motifs from other painters, chiefly Ernst...
WARNING! the first page of the first issue shouted in January 1977. RAPE OF THE MOTHER TONGUE WILL BE PUNISHED! The declared policy of the editor-reporter-printer is to "expose and ridicule examples of jargon, faulty syntax, redundancy" and any "outrage against English" practiced by Glassboro State memo writers, especially those in high places...