Word: vernacular
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...Right Stuff: that was the name we had been groping for. The phrase summarized the primitive and profound quality sensed beneath the space program's propaganda and the sometimes sleazy manipulations. It was, of course, Tom Wolfe who carefully defined a vague vernacular term and blazoned it as the title of his gloriously intelligent, funny and, above all, romantic bestseller "about the psychology of flying and the status competition among pilots." One suspects Wolfe's phrase is now poised for an even deeper and broader penetration into the common consciousness. For The Right Stuff, which many people thought...
...Japanese sources, transmitted to Germany nearly 50 years before by Frank Lloyd Wright, not just in details or quotations of carpentry, but in fundamentals, such as the open plan and the design of furniture. Thus a German brought Japan back to the Japanese, and the prestige of traditional vernacular among Japanese architects zoomed: a fact that might give pause to those who think that the mission of the Bauhaus was to standardize buildings everywhere. In effect, it enabled the Japanese to adapt to themselves. Perhaps this could have happened only to people accustomed, time out of mind, to living with...
...back to the subject of popular literature, and the Executioner asked, "Can you think of any examples of high literature which use the vernacular?" No. They suggested Twain. I hate Twain I said. "That depends on what you mean 'high' literature...
...period saw the birth of "diversity," a phrase that replaced "exclusively" on the tongues of Harvard men. True, the diversity went only so far (leaf through a 1950s vintage Yearbook some time; a Black face appears every fifth or sixth page). Still, by 1961 diplomas carried situations in the vernacular and not the Latin. A sense of excellence, of self-satisfaction, and of confidence, dominate the reminiscences from this year in Lant's book: "Freshman year I was thrown among brilliant strangers," John D. Spooner '59 writes. "General Motors Scholars, National Merit Scholars from Nebraska, Mississippi Pennsylvania, California, New Jersy...
Such optimism would seem empty if Singer did not test his characters so severely while they achieve it. His no-nonsense prose prohibits moral posturing. All of these stories were written first in Yiddish, a language that draws rough vitality from the vernacular; Singer has seen to it that his many translators preserve the outspoken qualities of the originals. (Gimpel the Fool was rendered in English by Saul Bellow, a rare instance of one future Nobel laureate transcribing another.) And the passage of time has ratified Singer's vision of the living and the dead busily coexisting. The places...