Word: vernacularized
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...founded, and some call it that today for different reasons. You see, the Porcellian Club--the most prestigious and mysterious of Harvard's nine final clubs--took its original name from two of its first members who enjoyed "that delicacy in roasted form," according to Cleveland Amory. The vernacular--and even the club--has changed since 1791, and Porcellian is now known to its enamored members as "the Porc...
Many snatches of American vernacular rise out of an implied belief in the mystical properties of names. To say that someone's "name is mud" is figuratively to eradicate the owner. An American speaking of the crux or essence of any pursuit will probably say "That's the name of the game." Obviously, James Russell Lowell was onto something when he wrote that "there is more force in names than most men dream...
Perhaps that is why the excerpts of Nixon's memoirs are so thoroughly and predictably disappointing. In a dull, clipped prose more reminiscent of Jerry Ford speaking off-the-cuff than his own roiling Pat Buchanan-William Safire speeches or football-fuck-em vernacular, nothing of the real Nixon emerges. The weird intensity, the paranoid desperation of the man who believed he always knew the right answer, and alone could act upon it, is gone. Instead, we are given a shallow, simplistic portrait of events, with the personality of the Great Vindictor sucked clean out of them. By contrast...
...nice temperature in the Iraqi desert--85. Sophomore Jim Dales chattered his way through a four-putt green and an 82. Senior Dave Paxton played a near impeccable front nine, then rose to the occasion at the long par-4 tenth hole and took, in the ever-inventive golf vernacular, a "snow man." "You know what a snow man looks like," said Paxton, "One ball of snow on top of another--an 8!" Paxton shot 81. George Arnold managed an 85. Alex Vik and Glenn Alexander eschewed the carnage in favor of hourlies...
Mostly the heroes suffer familiar postcombat nightmares, get drunk and chase women whose habits and vernacular are not from the Deep South of the 1940s but from porn magazines of today. Luxor itself remains as dimensionless as its women, evoking the Memphis that was its model only in the names-Peabody and Claridge-stuck on its hotels...