Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...times when you feel that if you hear the words elitist or subvert just once more, you'll barf. So when MOMA's Margit Rowell, who in the past has curated some intelligent shows on Constructivist sculpture, Brancusi, Antonin Artaud's drawings and other topics, affirms that Polke's vernacular has "regenerate[d] the language and meaning of Western artistic experience," and suggests that he is the Hieronymus Bosch of our day, you sigh. Polke has never shown a smidgen of the aesthetic intensity, the absorption in religious and moral experience or the staggering completeness of Bosch's universe...
Wonder, which ought to be thought of as a special state of mind, is devalued vernacular currency today. Wonder Woman, the WonderBra, Wonder Bread and our casual use of the term "wonderful" all desensitize us to wonder's power. Wonder doesn't receive justice in our modern parlance...
...adolescents and adults to get a look behind the masque of New Orleans' dazzling street festivals and sultry surface than to read Kate Chopin's tragedy The Awakening or John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer-prizewinning A Confederacy of Dunces, an epic comedy that captures the city's unique vernacular and customs...
...opera centers on a cantor, Yussele, whose beautiful voice earns him the nickname Solevey, the Polish vernacular for "nightingale." To study music, he must leave his tiny town and his love, Esther, behind...
...wouldn't want a Veep who flashed hot or popped Midol. Fast-forward to 1994, and the Washington Post could calmly interview power gals Pat Schroeder and Olympia Snowe on their feelings about hormone-replacement therapy--and no one was blushing or giggling. In fact, in the new femaleist vernacular, those aren't hot flashes; they're power surges. True, you might hesitate to rip off your sweater and start fanning your face at a meeting full of alpha males. But outside of that hostile environment, menopause is becoming a celebration-worthy rite of passage. Two New York City women...