Word: speech
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bouncing out of the wings and turning on his Missouri accent, he had gotten off a rousing, "give-'em-hell" speech, designed for the farmer-labor combination that had elected him last November. The audience at the Allegheny County Fair was tailor-made-farmers from the countryside, steelworkers from Pittsburgh's mills. "Farmers and industrial workers . . . depend on each other," he told them...
...when a curse was designed and intended to call down the wrath of heaven upon any object, animate or inanimate, has happily passed. Today, the words of imprecation, cursing and blasphemy survive in our speech shorn of their real meaning...
...himself in a world where everybody seemed to be talking about spies. He had moments of luck (trucks that picked him up at just the right moment); he also suffered from blunders-his own and those of the men who had trained him. American phrases had crept into his speech, and his conversation had grown self-conscious and artificial. But he was principally separated from the people around him because he no longer shared their defeat or their hopes, the undercurrent of panic, their confusion, their bitterness, or their dull conviction that the retreat of the German army would...
...Mesta's first evening in Luxembourg, a torchlight procession, including a brass band, appeared beneath the legation's windows. The band played Anchors Aweigh and the crowd sang a greeting to Madame la ministre. The bandleader made a speech, which was followed by the Star-Spangled Banner. The demonstrators marched off to Marching Through Georgia. Said Minister Mesta, looking after them from her front porch: "That was a real sweet thing for them...
Eliot's main problem: "To get a form of verse that would not falsify contemporary speech." Why not write it in prose? Explained Eliot: "There are lots of things you can't say in prose. I can write verse better than prose. When it is colloquially spoken, the very rhythm gets under people's skins and has a kind of atmospheric effect . . . The effect of first-rate verse should be to make us believe that there are moments in life when poetry is the natural form of expression of ordinary men and women...