Word: earful
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...word "fidelity." Often used as publicity jargon, the word actually refers to a scientific measurement of sound waves an electronic system can reproduce. Fidelity is measured in cycles per second. A true high-fidelity phonograph must reproduce up to 15,000 cycles, the full range of the human ear. Although the actual musical notes may be much lower than this, high fidelity range allows a machine to reproduce orchestral overtones so that the recorded music will sound like the original music instead of a watered-down version...
There is nothing very awful about the show; it's just that there is nothing particularly good. Morton Gould's music falls agreeably enough on the ear, but little of it will ever haunt the memory. Michael Kidd's dances have a lively but not unfamiliar spin. Adapted from 1933's The Pursuit of Happiness, the book, for something with history as well as humor on its mind, does fairly well, but it is only a book, and a much too bulky...
From Maxim's corner, Manager Kearns kept up a stream of chatter: "Step back. Get out of it, Joey." His fighter, one ear cocked for instructions, did as he was told. In the seventh, Joey got the go-ahead signal. He began exploding left hooks and right crosses against Mills's jaw. He loosened two of Freddie's teeth; the champ's handlers fished them out of his mouth after the round. They fished out a third tooth after the eighth...
There are no pyrotechnics, even, of language; the brilliance lies in the precision. Much of the verse is spoken-and strikes the ear-as prose; where the emotion or situation intensifies, the rhythm does. Yet there are echoes of Eliot's own verse and a few faintly Elizabethan ones; examples of his skill in having characters pick up one another's phrases like dropped cues; and of speeches in which a key word is repeated several times with fine effect...
Hands in the Brain. Childe Rosie progresses through Italy to the accompaniment of a mighty lurching, whanging and screeching of the prose mechanism. Anybody with half an ear would call for a garage stop, but Author Llewellyn doggedly goes on piling up mileage. His princess does not get angry: she "looked through scarlet lace." A soldier does not feel regret: "hands were wringing in his brain." Snowy's leg is not suddenly weak: it goes to "laughing gristle." Other Llewellynisms that would flood any ordinary carburetor: "A quick thrust of pity alchemised her feeling to a silt of motherly...