Word: vowels
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...space grid, 15 by 15, with 180-degree symmetry and about a sixth of the squares black. The words, of no fewer than three letters, are interlocked. And nothing naughty, please. Reagle, one of the puzzlemakers who appears in Wordplay, mourns that he is forbidden to use vowel-rich words like urine and enema. (I'd guess that somebody somewhere has created R- or X-rated crosswords - English is as at least as rich in obscenities as it is in four-letter words for Irish slave - but I haven't seen them...
...early poem: "The only beauty's ugly, man / The cracklin', breakin', shakin' sounds're / The only beauty I understand." With extended exposure, his ugly became beauty. Intimate and accusatory, the voice twisted and tortured each word in a lyric, weirdly drawing out the silent half of a vowel sound - not "rain" but "raiiiiin", not "deal" but "deaaaaal...
...similarity isn’t always a good thing. As some Facebook groups have noted with irony, often it can be downright silly; surely I don’t need to be in a special class because my last name is five letters long and ends in a vowel. Sometimes it might even be harmful; in the past, your drinking buddies may have been your politically diverse colleagues, but now thanks to web sites like drinkingliberally.com you can imbibe in more comfortably homogenous company. This is probably good for grassroots political organization, but it might encourage polarization at the expense...
...Behind him were three voices in the pop-R&B tradition, an octave or so below Frankie's. Usually the other guys didn't have much more to do than intone a few vowel sounds or (on "Stay") pow sounds-the oohs and ahhs of 50s doo-wop. But there was a solidity to the Seasons' backing vocals. With Valli doing all the filigree work, the other three were the long, smooth, sturdy road his falsetto danced on. Listen, for example, to "Rag Doll" (one of 51 selections on the very rich Seasons Anthology CD from Rhino Records). It begins...
...realize how weird Bob Dylan sounded on first hearing--when the gods of show biz must have wondered, Who let him in? A slight figure with voluptuous lips and a hawk's hooded eyes, he hid behind his guitar and his neck-brace harmonica and emitted those torturous barnyard vowel sounds. Yet almost immediately, people got it. The imagery was so rich and cascading, the urgency of his outrage so compelling and contagious that listeners pretty quickly adjusted their long-held definition of what a folk song--or a pop song--was or could...