Word: verbs
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AERIAL BALLET: NILSSON (RCA Victor). While most rock singers sound like so many caterwauling cats conjugating the verb "to be," Nilsson, 25, sings with clear honesty and lack of pretense. He has composed a highly creative rock-vaudeville show with all the acts: a tap number, a cowboy ballad, a torch song, and an acrobatic display of vocal jazz scatting. Altogether an excellent performance despite an overlying, oddly out-of-place air of melancholy that sometimes threatens to spoil...
...cumon, now! Rock 'n' roll was not originally a "copulative verb." The term was used quite commonly among seafaring men in the 17th century, and referred to an ancient sea chanty with numerous verses and the repeating chorus...
...word cop means many things to many people, and its origin is not certain. One explanation is that it is the abbreviation for Constable of Police; another traces it to the verb copper?to arrest or inform against. * Apparently from "Mr. Charlie," the equivalent of honky or whitey. -In an experimental program pioneered by the Vera Institute of Justice, New York is now sending many Bowery drunks to an infirmary, where they are dried out, counseled, and assisted in finding jobs. In six months, only 150 of the 650 men treated have been arrested again...
...such recordings as Aretha's and Mitch Ryder's, "Sock it to me" is now used in a neutral sense as a catch-phrase on TV's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and is a common sight on bumper stickers and even political placards. Jazz (originally a copulative verb) and rock 'n' roll (from a blues lyric, "My baby rocks me with a steady roll") are other examples...
...driftwood, buttons and other attic rubbish, his works took on a pathos and intimacy that more formal cubist compositions lacked. Schwitters himself always insisted that Merz was a nonsense syllable, derived from a phrase from an advertisement for the "Kommerz und Privatbank." But merzen is also an obsolete German verb connoting rejection. Both as nonsense and as nostalgia, Schwitters' handsome, 5-ft. by 4-ft. Merz Picture with Rainbow clearly foreshadows Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" of the 1950s...