Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When Hillary Clinton sat down to write her first book, it became an instant best seller. Her audiotape narration even won a Grammy. And of course the title, It Takes a Village, entered the vernacular. The President wasn't quite so fortunate. When he wrote his first book in office, Between Hope and History, it went straight to the remainder bins...
...among the first American operas to take as a theme the immigrant experience, and Bolcom, 61, is just the man to forge a musical language appropriate to the task. A prime mover in the ragtime revival of the 1960s, he has long been up to his ears in vernacular music, lavishly stirring it into his classical compositions (McTeague, Songs of Innocence and Experience) and accompanying his wife, the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, in delectable recitals of popular song (they do everything from Sondheim to Shine On, Harvest Moon...
...police vernacular, Gidone Busch was an "EDP"--an emotionally disturbed person. His medical records show that he believed he was directed by God to save drug addicts and exotic dancers, that his friends were prophets and that he was the messiah. When the police were called in last week, he was menacing children in a predominantly Hasidic Jewish section of Brooklyn, and he attacked the cops with a claw hammer. The police shot him to death with 12 bullets. Should they have just maimed Busch to subdue him? New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said, "When [police] make a decision...
...movies had learned to talk and, with the help of Broadway-bred writers, did so in a sassy vernacular that singed sensitive ears. And the films were acted with a feral intelligence. James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Mae West, Barbara Stanwyck were street-level stars with insolent accents and attitudes. "There we were, like an uncensored movie," says Harlow of one tryst in Red-Headed Woman (she fornicates her way up the social ladder, gets found out and lands in Paris with a new sugar daddy and a stud chauffeur). These guys and dolls could dish it out and just...
They are the great romantics of the black tradition: what Ellington played, Bearden painted; what Bearden painted and Ellington played, Ellison put into words. Together their work expressed the belief that the ultimate source of a sublime African-American art was to be found in the vernacular--the myths and folktales, the language games such as the dozens and signifying, and the sorrow songs and blues out of which each fashioned a sophisticated jazz idiom. And most audaciously of all, each believed the fundamental structuring principle of Negro art--improvisation--was also the essence of American democracy. The ultimate Americans...