Word: vulgarisms
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...folk tales, the power that changes a frog to a prince is called magic. In life, it is known as nostalgia. Wrapped in it, a newspaper becomes an illuminated manuscript, a vulgar city is transformed into El Dorado. Ben Hecht, once one of the highest-paid scenarists in Hollywood, had a nostalgia factory for a brain; what went in as the apprenticeship of a yellow journalist emerged as gilded celebrations of innocence...
...daughter of the Rev. Linwood Hanson, minister of the Baptist Church in nearby Byrant Pond, came home from the school and complained to her parents of "vulgar" content in her assigned reading. The minister and his wife sampled parts of the three novels and said they "were shocked." The Rev. Hanson branded the books as part of a "worldwide plot by Satan to teach young people to laugh at God," and resolved forthwith to get them removed from the school curriculum." I oppose their use on the grounds that they convey the idea that everyone lives like it says...
There are so few images of people beyond the vulgar shapes of Pop that every figure you come across prints its plaintive face on your mind. Hollowness emanating like artificial sunlight from the doll-like people-the works of Hopper stand out from among the abstract pieces with haunting truthfulness. The only lyrical references to humanity emerge from the brush strokes of De Kooning and Kline-figures of paint both suggested and dissolved by a network of strokes. But the viewer of the vast rooms of abstraction feels the constant stares of the paintings reaching beyond their frames, asking...
...Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." I am the New Woman whose astonishing history is a poignant amalgam of vulgar dreams and knife-sharp realities. Soon, by an extreme gesture, I shall cease altogether to be human and become legend like Jesus, Buddha, Cybele...
Voltaire failed from a kind of perfection. Everything came easily to him except a certain divinely vulgar excess. He was, as one critic complained, a "chaos of clear ideas." He accused Shakespeare of being "barbarous," "unbridled," "low" and "absurd." Exactly. And that coarse strength is what we miss at last in Voltaire. By his masterly demonstration of the farthest reach of reason, he finally showed how much lies beyond...