Word: vernacular
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...worse, TV cops who sing or TV cops who swear? America will get to decide that question this fall when producer Steven Bochco, who created Cop Rock (as well as Hill Street Blues), premieres his NYPD Blue on ABC. Bochco negotiated an unusual agreement with ABC over the crude vernacular he could use on the show. According to that confidential document, among the 30 or so prime-time words acceptable to ABC are such bizarre semi-obscenities as mother jumper and humphead, as well as a vulgar term for feces and a vulgar term for female genitalia...
...iron matter? Partly for symbolic reasons: it was the common material of industry, old as the smith-god Hephaistos but new as the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge -- "ignoble," vernacular material that, set up beside the "noble" marble and bronze of traditional sculpture, could not but detonate new trains of imagery...
...motorists to pause is that of a man with a mane of white hair beckoning them to turn in on a Saturday afternoon, park their cars, fill the 85,500 seats at Stanford Stadium and watch him lead the local student athletes to the promised land. Which, in the vernacular of Stanford football, means the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena on January...
Modernist celebration of (highlight now) the vernacular is another theme that crops up repeatedly in The Art of Celebration. Gerald Murphy's "Razor" (1924), for instance, is a "signal work in the evolution of a self-conscious American vernacular art," a celebration of "small technological advances and the utilitarian elegance of industrial design." After High Modernism has run its course, Appel points to the resurrection of the vernacular in the wake...
Last week the papers attempted to use replacement workers -- "scabs" in union vernacular -- to deliver editions printed in Canada. Although just 15% (about the national average) of the Pittsburgh work force is unionized, the company's use of fill-ins -- as well as an outside security force dressed in military-style uniforms and combat boots -- struck the wrong chord in a city that's marking the centennial of the 1892 Homestead Strike, in which 10 steelworkers were shot by Pinkerton security guards at Andrew Carnegie's factory just outside town. Readers burned papers, and advertisers displayed signs proclaiming that they...