Word: syntax
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Last week, in a book-littered room on the University of Chicago campus, Miss Geweke was buried in vocabulary and syntax. She had three scholars working with her; volunteers in schools and colleges all over the U.S. had answered her discreet little notes asking for help, placed in classical journals. A professor at Tulane University had made her a list of 8,000 Latin words which closely resemble the English. A teacher at Pennsylvania's Ursinus College had made a frequency count of Vergil's vocabulary. The chairman of the State University of Iowa's classics department...
...hero of this novel is like the title, a trifle bewildered about English syntax but eloquent just the same. He is an old black man in an old black suit, pastor of a poor country church in Natal, and South Africa is seen through his hurt and innocent eyes. Father Stephen Kumalo is a Zulu whom white missionaries redeemed from darkness. But neither he nor his tribe have found peace on earth since the tribal society was destroyed...
...such music tolerated in churches? Professor Gore thinks that it is only because "music is a foreign language; one person in a hundred knows its grammar and syntax, not one in a thousand knows its esthetics." Good church music, the professor believes, besides being written by the best composers, must either: 1) be set in a musical style that does not sound at all like secular music (i.e., the unaccompanied Gregorian chants-still sung in many a Catholic and Anglican church); or 2) have its secular elements "assimilated and purged of their worldly connotations" (i.e., the cantatas, Passions and organ...
...thoroughly acquired it. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov's second novel in English (he has written seven in Russian), is one of the most intelligent nightmares of dictatorship in modern fiction. It is also a lip-smacking over the flavors of English prose to rouse the tired syntax in 10,000 editorials. Nabokov's style glimmers with reflections of many great styles (Gogol's, Flaubert's, Joyce's) and yet is distinctly his own: rapid, brilliantly metaphorical, daintily savage and smooth. The reader, never bored, can run his own blue pencil through Nabokov's excesses...
...from Latin. ... I refuse to reveal my sources, but teachers of English in colleges and universities have told me that most of the boys who enter without Latin can't write an English sentence. They don't know the meaning of words. . . . They don't understand syntax...