Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...most thickly populated (often include 100 characters). Their authors are mostly obscure. But what particularly distinguishes them is their style. Aimed at the common people, snooted by the super-pedants who monopolized Chinese "literature," frequently banned by imperial bureaucrats (who usually read them secretly), they were written in the vernacular. The least "literary" of great fiction, they mixed myth and legend with realistic anecdotes of love, family life, singsong girls, bandits, war lords, scholars, intrigue. This bootleg literature, called hsiaoshuo, or "a little talk," is still read by millions of Chinese. Three Kingdoms (San Kuo), written in the 13th Century...
...Bullet Has Went." The poetical effusions of the late John V. A. Weaver, husband of Actress Peggy Wood, are first-class examples of lowbrowed magazine verse. As such they have the large yet limited historical interest of having been almost entirely written in the no-browed vernacular that H. L. Mencken, dean of U. S. critical horse-doctors, has long plugged as the right speech of real Americans...
Weaver's lyrics and conversation-pieces are, almost without exception, expressions of the helplessness of ordinary citizens to handle bad breaks in their lives. His "vernacular" mimics the point-blank way Americans have of admitting helplessness; but it fails to register the optimism Americans normally extract from feeling 100% free to be honest about their helplessness...
...Germany, England, Spain, Switzerland, and the Mediterranean countries. Based on thoroughly modern principles of design, his works, however, do not stand out like sore thumbs upon the landscape as do so many of the buildings of his contemporaries, for he has been able to incorporate into his style vernacular and traditional details which adapt the works to the surroundings in which they are placed...
...director's function is primarily that of a highschool, dramatic coach, raised to a fabulous power of complexity. He tells $5,000-a-week stars where to stand and how to speak, screenwriters with millionaires' incomes how to rewrite the classics they are translating into the topical vernacular, photographers where to point cameras as big as limousines, art directors to fabricate rooms, streets or cities. If producers are top dogs of the cinema as an industry, directors are its top craftsmen. Their pay runs from $200 a week (for beginners) to what Columbia pays Capra for turning...