Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Having slept in many a foxhole with him, I take TIME to task for a flippantly misleading background sketch of a most able man, neither melancholy nor laconic, and in the vernacular of the "Cousin Jacks" (an Army nickname pinned on Searls because of his fund of Welsh miners' stories) I say "Back...
...Goldwyn's hired hands have worked hard to give us a new slant on the old hick-meets-city-girl situation. This version has Gary Cooper as a musty grammarian who goes to the masses in search of live vernacular. Inevitably, he meets Barbara Stanwyck, who is a night-club warbler with Gene Krupa's orchestra. She talks a Hollywoodish brand of slang that will leave even the boys from Lindy's open-mouthed...
...died early in Look Homeward, Angel) is a short, beautifully disciplined work, in a style of which Wolfe is popularly supposed to have been incapable. Chickamauga, which Wolfe slicked up unnaturally in the vain hope of selling it to the Satevepost, is a respectable experiment in the U.S. vernacular, as un-Wolfeishly plain as weathered bone. Also included: a steely-clean character sketch of a rich old New Yorker waking up; an almost religious essay on loneliness; a hard spanking of a literary critic who might be William Lyon Phelps or Henry Seidel Canby; a Swiftian attack on Irishmen...
Anyway, that is the gist of what each Eli says when he gives the Long Cheer, for in Aristo phones' "The Frogs" the frogs yell at the people going to the underworld. "Bre-ke-ke-kex," which translated into American vernacular means "Go to h--, you bums." At the same time, the bre-ke-ke-kex is the three staccato dots and the long dash which stand for "V" for Victory." --From the Yale News...
That fact could not be mistaken. Day before the freezing order the President had explained why in the simplest vernacular. Talking off the cuff to a group of civilian-defense volunteers he made them a little homily so saltily effective and lucid that the critical Baltimore Sun allowed: "There was a bit of Lincoln in it." Said the President...