Word: syntax
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...such music tolerated in churches? Professor Gore thinks that it is only because "music is a foreign language; one person in a hundred knows its grammar and syntax, not one in a thousand knows its esthetics." Good church music, the professor believes, besides being written by the best composers, must either: 1) be set in a musical style that does not sound at all like secular music (i.e., the unaccompanied Gregorian chants-still sung in many a Catholic and Anglican church); or 2) have its secular elements "assimilated and purged of their worldly connotations" (i.e., the cantatas, Passions and organ...
...thoroughly acquired it. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov's second novel in English (he has written seven in Russian), is one of the most intelligent nightmares of dictatorship in modern fiction. It is also a lip-smacking over the flavors of English prose to rouse the tired syntax in 10,000 editorials. Nabokov's style glimmers with reflections of many great styles (Gogol's, Flaubert's, Joyce's) and yet is distinctly his own: rapid, brilliantly metaphorical, daintily savage and smooth. The reader, never bored, can run his own blue pencil through Nabokov's excesses...
...from Latin. ... I refuse to reveal my sources, but teachers of English in colleges and universities have told me that most of the boys who enter without Latin can't write an English sentence. They don't know the meaning of words. . . . They don't understand syntax...
Ulysses-banned in the U.S. until 1933, when a federal court declared that its incidental obscenities did not make it an obscene book-was hard enough. Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce's 'final work, written in a dream language of outrageous puns and unheard-of syntax, was a great deal harder; it could not be read, in the ordinary sense-it had to be unraveled...
...university presses usually mosey along about their useful, traditional business, publishing scholarly biographies, monographs on the pterodactyl or .the mud turtle, studies in the. syntax of Middle English or Middle High German prose. But some of them are broadening their lists, and now the young, enterprising Rutgers University .Press has gone streaking off on its own to corral a Lincoln volume for which almost any big-city commercial publisher would have mortgaged his corporate soul. The Book-of-the-Month Club has made it its February choice,* and 500,000 copies are in print...