Word: dialect
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...possession of Yarkand, and it took Paxton's smoothest Chinese to talk his party's way through. Paxton dismissed the truck and the jeeps, and hired ten caravan men with 33 horses and a handful of camels and donkeys. A white mongrel dog named It (Turki dialect for dog) decided to join the caravan for pot luck...
...Auto-stop" has the advantage of simplifying travel arrangements. Trains and busses mean tickets, and tickets mean the problem of effective communication with the man at the other side of the ticket window, whether he speaks in Cockney or dialect French. Travel is supposed to promote international understanding; it seems to be more apt to produce complete international confusion...
Latter-day Runyon creatures spoke a language of their own, a dialect which showed traces of remote English ancestry but which, despite its lack of formal grammar, was curiously courtly in its rhythms. When a Runyon character wanted to say that a tout had left money to his girl friend to buy him a tombstone, he said, "I am under the impression that he leaves Beatrice well loaded as far as the do-re-mi is concerned and I take it for granted that she handles the stone situation." In Runyonese there was only one tense, the universal present...
Last month Garry Davis came to Trouillas. Fabrégas introduced him to the village's bright-eyed mayor, Gaston Méric. Davis had trouble understanding Méric's Catalan dialect, and Méric had trouble understanding Davis' French; but ideas percolated back & forth. Said the mayor, after Davis had gone: "I felt sure he was a nut. I'm still not sure he isn't. But maybe that's what we need to have peace...
Richard Tolman felt a certain uneasiness at finding himself living outside the centuries of his favorite authors, but it was not for lack of physical comforts. Mealie, his Negro housekeeper, saw to his well-being at home, listened patiently to his erudite rumblings, and entertained her employer in dialect that Amos 'n' Andy would consider extravagant. In his New York office, shapely Tally, possessor of a delightful A-to-B cultural range, was in charge. Richard's heart, however, belonged to Zoe Else, a New York psychiatrist whose attractions were heightened by a familiarity with Bartlett...