Word: verbalism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov. A monstrous, witty work of often bewildering verbal agility, in which a respected old poet is annotated to death by a lunatic scholar-or is he an exiled king...
...becoming Pope - one must not campaign for the election. Readers of Nabokov's new book, which is surely the most eccentric novel published in this decade, have considerable reason to feel that the author is campaigning. Pale Fire, like Lolita, is a monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work whose verbal agility is often bewildering. But unlike the earlier book, Pale Fire does not really cohere as a satire; good as it is, the novel in the end seems to be mostly an exercise in agility - or perhaps in bewilderment...
...combination of harmony and pleasure." If it is a key to a door, "the most important thing is for the key to work; it is quite unimportant what lies behind the door." Whatever meaning or non-meaning lies behind the door, any reader can delight in watching the greatest verbal prestidigitator of his time at work, keeping seven ambiguities in the air, cutting cliches in half with a flick of his snickersnee, and as a finale, slipping out of the tightest of knots, the tidiest of pigeonholes. It may not be significant, but it is done with dazzling skill...
...weeks ago, have been strangely quiet. The Laotian river town of Houei Sai, evacuated in panic after the fall of Nam Tha, was reoccupied by 300 skittish Royal Laotian Army troops. If anything, the Pathet Lao had retreated, not advanced. With Soviet Russia giving at least verbal agreement to the U.S. policy of creating a neutral Laos, it was apparently time once again to bring together the three idiosyncratic princes who lead the different Laotian factions...
After a stroke, these verbal types become intensely frustrated when they cannot use language effectively. The frustration may be so intense that it provokes emotional disturbance leading to physical violence. "But a certain amount of frustration is a good sign for chances of recovery," says Mrs. Taylor. "It's normal to be frustrated when you can't talk." From the first evaluation tests of patients by her staff of eight therapists. Mrs. Taylor nearly always finds that family members have a deep and extremely dangerous misunderstanding of the problem...