Word: formula
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Regular Formula. Medina warned defense witnesses that they might be jailed for contempt if they refused to answer proper questions, cut them off sharply when they plunged into shrill attacks on Wall Street, the Ku Klux Klan or the Atlantic pact. "This trial would go on for an indefinite period if I received all the evidence offered every time two Communists talked to each other," he said...
...formula used in Everything is one way of doubling and tripling the number and variety of songs and dances in a movie without having to worry about whether they fit into the plot. With good enough air-cooling in neighborhood thea ters, it could also triple the summer till...
About the most that can be said for these younger writers is that they do not succumb to some of the faults of their literary elders. They do not force the complexities of life into a tight Freudian or Marxian formula, nor mutter Hemingway-hexed monosyllables through the corners of their mouths. And they do not mangle the language as did those who made the error of confusing themselves with James Joyce...
...trails were cut when Sherwood Anderson rebelled against the O. Henry plot formula, when Theodore Dreiser discarded the genteel tradition, and when Ernest Hemingway sharpened and toughened the language. But the trails that were fresh and even perilous a few decades ago are now dusty and routine, and most of the writers in Miss Foley's collection are still stumbling along them...
Considered Opinion. The early Runyon shows talents of two kinds: he might have written boys' stories with the charm and freshness of Booth Tarkington's Penrod books, or he might have become a Lardner-like realist in vernacular. Instead, he mastered a highly successful formula...