Word: verbalism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...require a standardized written exam as part of a "readiness assessment" that determines who passes and who fails kindergarten. Testing of various kinds is prevalent in three-fourths of the other states for evaluating aspiring first- graders. In Minneapolis, for example, kindergartners must answer a set of 56 verbal questions put to them on a one-to-one basis (last year 13% failed). Many Connecticut and Michigan youngsters face similar tests. But only Georgia asks all its tots -- in both public and private schools -- to sit down, No. 2 pencils in hand, and fill in the blanks...
...narrative, from the prose poems of Francis Ponge and the micro-essays of Jorge Luis Borges (quickness) to the encyclopedic and incomplete novels of Robert Musil and Carlo Emilio Gadda (multiplicity). He addresses a variety of literary problems. In his essay on visibility, for example, he contrasts visual and verbal imaginations, examining the prefabricated images of the mass media and their control over how we create pictures from words and words from pictures...
...inventing or redefining terms. He does not bully the reader with tortuous grammar, or leave gaps and ambiguities in his logic as examples of the defects in language itself; his sentences are clear and simple. "There is a lightening of language," Calvino posits, "whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency...
...play of words that cannot be reconstructed into image, or of an interpretative unity. Calvino suggests, however, that these exceptions surreptitiously conform to the rules they appear to violate: for example, he discovers a "lightness of thoughtfulness" in the abstract descriptive prose of Henry James, despite James' verbal density...
Eisenman said that because the Drug Enforcement Administration continues to work with Noriega and the Central Intelligence Agency is protective of the general, verbal commitments to oppose his rule mean little...