Word: circumflex
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Reading Barthelme, you'd think he crawled from the steaming wreckage of an asteroid that originated in the outer solar system. In fact, he grew up in Houston. Born in 1931, the son of an influential architect, he was a good-looking, headstrong kid with ironic eyebrows like circumflex marks. He was restless and rebarbative, full of jittery, sarcastic energy and the kind of confidence that forms only around a tiny seed of insecurity. After experimenting with college, journalism and marriage in Houston, he got sick of the provinces and lit out for New York City...
...technique. For the first time, it was possible for the masses to study, close up, the romantic style of the great masters. It may not have always been wise to imitate the ideal, of course. Rudolph Valentino, for example, favored a hyperbolic style, arching the woman back into a circumflex and doing semaphor with his eyebrows. He had the technique of a gifted and tormented periodontist. Nor is it always advisable for amateurs to try to reproduce the unforgettable scenes, like the one in which Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr tumble in the Hawaiian surf in From Here to Eternity...
...still looks good at 66, though his face is fleshier and squarer and seems on pace to merge completely with his neck sometime around 2008. But it's still a face made for acting--all punctuation marks, from those pointy circumflex eyebrows to the profound parentheses on either side of his mouth. Lounging in his favorite suite at a New York City hotel, Nicholson sits in an armchair and drinks coffee and smokes Camel Lights. After a weekend of interviews, his lilting, comforting-yet-unnerving voice is shot to the point that it's just a husky growl, but Nicholson...
...proposed changes will affect at most 4,000 of the 50,000 words in use, but such minor "rectifications" cut no ice with editors and academics who have launched a vigorous contre-attaque (new spelling: contrattaque). At the center of their protest is the circumflex accent, a little hat the French occasionally put over vowels (as in chateau and hotel, crouton and maitre). To simplify matters, the new rules would remove it from...
...style and chic as an egg is of albumin. But is the kind of sensibility in its design-the springy black silhouette of blouse and tunic relieved by one dash of white, the brisk notation of the face smeared and flecked by the black lace veil, the emphatic circumflex of the painted fan behind the girl's head-essentially different from that of Degas, Cassatt's mentor? Stylishness does not go by gender; perhaps it never did. Cecilia Beaux's Sita and Sarita (1921) looks "feminine" when you know that it is the work of a once...