Word: vernacular
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Andromache is a production of mordant humor, bitter irony and moral force -- if also of significant miscalculation and highly uneven acting. Some of the performers are tripped up by Eric Korn's half-arch, half-vernacular translation, in which vulgarity and clumsy colloquialism ("Is death the net result of all my love?") clash with the neoclassicism of the set and costumes. The plot is a sour inversion of the lovers' tangle in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Orestes (Kevin McNally), son of the murdered war hero Agamemnon, pursues his cousin Hermione (Penelope Wilton), daughter of Helen of Troy...
Wattleton, along with syndicated Columnist Ellen Goodman and legions of other modern women, also objects to Wattenberg's tendency, as Goodman puts it, "to slip easily back into a traditional vernacular -- woman as exclusive child raiser." Schearer links this objection to the fundamental criticism of Wattenberg's espousal of Government birth incentives for the sake of international dominance. "There is something distasteful," he says, "about the concept that we should subvert personal aspirations in the democracy of America to the cause of maintaining our world-power status in the 21st century...
...podium, Kemp reverts to a Southern California vernacular. Things he likes, from his family house in suburban Maryland to the flowering of capitalism in the Third World, are "really neat." He is proud of his erudition, using French phrases like elan vital, but he sometimes tosses out strange neologisms, like "braggadocious." His tastes are unabashedly middlebrow. He saw the musical Les Miserables three times and with characteristic gusto has become a one-man ad for the show, telling people that "it's the best musical since Man of la Mancha...
While a student at the university from 1956 to 1960, Reed developed his pastiche style, he says, as a result of the contradictory influences of traditional canonical English professors and linguists who helped him understand the potential of Afro-American vernacular in literature...
...vernacular...