Word: vowell
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...public and many of the news commentators seem unwilling to pronounce Sputnik correctly, with the phoneme of the vowel sound of "boot" rather than that of "but." E. G. FLETCHER Austin, Texas
This was not what happened four years ago when the "opera" had its first stage performance in Mannheim. Then the audience reacted wildly almost as soon as the curtain rose. Emitting open vowel sounds, the tenor sang: "AUAUAUAUAU a U A U." Outdoing him, the bass boomed, "U UE U UE," only to be interrupted by a chorus which periodically burst out with "Agatta-Gatta-Gatta." These sounds so unnerved the Mannheim audience that it responded with heartfelt "pfuis!", and an incensed reviewer described it as possibly "the worst opera ever written." By contrast, some Berlin spectators last week...
Timofey Pnin is a Russian émigré professor who has won a Pyrrhic victory over the English language. His name itself is a sneeze in search of a vowel. His colleagues at a small Eastern college can make out Pnin's pastoral odes to "Tsentral Park," but few realize that "I search for the viscous and sawdust" is a request for whisky and soda. Devoted to the active verb and the present tense, Pnin invests the simplest acts with explosive vitality ("I never go in a hat even in winter"). In all verbal matters, Pnin would rather...
...chief novelty, though now 31 years old, was a work in which the chorus sang for half an hour without emitting a single word, Vaughan Williams' extraordinary Flos Campi. In this piece the chorus vocalizes on all kinds of vowel sounds and musically sustainable consonants. The composer was not interested in expressing ideas, but rather in evoking moods by exploiting sheer sonority and tonal colors. Occasionally there appeared such typical Vaughan Williams features as chordal parallelism; but mixed in with them were wonderful wailing appoggiaturas and, above all non-Western melodic lines that so characteristically turned back on themselves--which...
...story after story, the cut of the waistcoat or the shape of a vowel is used-as it can be used only in a caste-conscious country-to indicate character. The U.S. reader may be baffled by the careful way in which, in The Evolution of Saxby, Bates makes clear that Saxby is the sort of man who, if it were not wartime, would be wearing a rosebud in his buttonhole. But a dozen other tales-of love glimpsed suddenly across a roomful of dreadful people, of a glint of bitterness in an ill-mated couple on a journey...