Word: idiom
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...When snow flies." New England has many idioms rich and expressive, but none so beautiful as this. There is a softness, a merriment, a silence, a simple beauty about it that the rigorous, taciturn upcountrymen seldom achieve. This idiom, casually dropped across the counter of the general store when the mountains swelter in midsummer sun, brings to mind the far off ring of sleigh bells, and the white antiguity of hills...
...seems a long lane down which there is no corner. And on this lane the Vagabond must leave you. All that he might say has been said before, that which he could do no man would do. But it is his hope that these forces which have made the idiom false and empty may in themselves restore a truer, fuller moaning to his wish of a "Most Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year...
...student with no conception of the proper sound of a language to spend time in studying its poetry. Many who have lived abroad and who can already speak French or German fluently find repeated practice in talking a necessary means of retaining their facility in the foreign idiom. Besides offering a chance for actual practice this innovation affords an opportunity for valuable association with exchange students and professors...
Gosse was fond of correcting his friends' grammar. Once he remonstrated with George Moore for his use of the phrase "more than you think for." Moore replied: "Shakespeare uses it and my parlormaid uses it, and an idiom which Shakespeare and my parlormaid use is good enough for me. . . . Your own writing, my dear Gosse, would be improved by idiom.'' Says Biographer Charteris: "Gosse . . . was deeply offended, and many explanations were necessary to avert the danger which menaced a friendship of forty years." An admirer of Walt Whitman, Gosse visited the U. S. to lecture, called...
...fires into the air. He postures elegantly, makes desperately winning speeches, executes paltry and artful stratagems, yet remains dull - a character falling halfway between life and fantasy. In spite and perhaps because of the glittering flood of language poured over it, Colonel Satan is too far from the idiom of the modern theatre to be satisfying entertainment...