Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...British cartoonist who sketched the ne'er-do-well Andy Capp for more than 40 years; in Hartlepool, England. It was a comic strip sprung from the heart: Smythe patterned the beer-guzzling, bumptious bloke and his long-suffering wife Flo on his parents. Although Capp spoke in the vernacular of working-class northern England, his chatter had universal appeal, enlivening the funny pages in dozens of countries...
Juxtaposed against these movers and shakers on spring break are the lift operators, ski patrol and resort workers: the locals. These tough and hardy souls sacrifice their "earning potential," as we would say in Harvard vernacular, for something we don't have: 120 days of skiing a year in the peace, beauty and allure of the mountains...
...traffic sign that looms above the boys as they wait for the school bus at the beginning of most episodes. The sign, one of those iconic warnings to drivers that children are at play, shows a little girl and boy running hand in hand. This is the kind of vernacular image that Parker and Stone, like so many visual artists, love to use, and here it quietly sounds the notes of childhood and danger, two subjects at the heart of South Park. Just ask Kenny...
...background, as invasive and patriarchal as could be), seems to have fairly burst into the room. A cat, scared witless by the angel's irruption, bounds away, back arched--you can almost hear it hiss. The painting is funny and reverent, gawky and vernacular and dreamlike, all at the same time. Hence its modern appeal...
...with his father's Puerto Rican mistress and his experience at a lively family party. Here Diaz once again proves that he is one of the best young writers around not for what Proulx calls his distinct "cultural, ethnic, and class" perspective, but because underneath his deceptively simple, "street vernacular" prose is a powerful storyteller as equally capable of the comic (the narrator's chronic car-sickness makes for some oddly funny moments) as he is with exploring the tricky dynamic existence between husbands and wives, fathers and sons, and families in general...