Word: idiom
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...also lagging: out of 800 compositions that the committee looked over, about one in five had five or more spelling mistakes. There were also 225 errors in tense, 103 "misplaced modifiers," 309 cases of awkward structure, 729 errors involving personal pronouns, and 1,000 mistakes in "word usage and idiom...
...unfamiliar atmosphere of respectability, Scratchy resignedly throws away his six-shooter and says farewell once & for all to his glorious gun-toting past. In James Agee's lean adaptation and in some peppery performances, The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky captures much of Crane's pungent idiom, and becomes a spry blend of gun-in-holster and tongue-in-cheek...
...Biblical Baedeker, he takes his listeners strolling down Pavements of Gold, introduces them to a rippling-muscled Christ who resembles Charles Atlas with a halo, then drops them abruptly into the Lake of Fire for a sample scalding. His language is a strange, original blend of farm-boy idiom, Shakespeare, the New Testament and the newest slang. Sample Grahamism, aimed at those who protest that they were raised in good Christian homes, therefore don't need to be "converted": "Just because you were born in a garage, does that make you an automobile...
...reputation, a big voice. She scales the voice down pretty far for the old pulse-bumpers like A Bird in a Gilded Cage, My Mother Was a Lady, Waiting for the Robert E. Lee. The job could have been done with more authority by somebody closer to the idiom...
...vulgar snafu derivatives may have been American in origin . . . but acceptance and widespread dissemination of their useful addition to Anglo-Saxon idiom was peculiarly British and essentially Eighth Armyish. Your correct if prudish definition of snafu as "situation normal, all fouled up" is a reminder that there were exclusively British ascending and descending degrees of snafu. There was the "self-adjusting snafu" and the "non-self-adjusting snafu." And there was the climactic "cummfu," which, roughly translated, meant "complete utter monumental military foul...