Word: verbalized
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...series of musical numbers work for humor in several dimensions at once, as they treat cliches of musical tradition, situation comedy, character humor and verbal wit. Judy Kahan parodies a torch song singer of the long-legged husky-voiced school in "Euclid's Elemental." Perched on the piano, she crooned movingly about the hypotenuse of a right triangle and touched the audience deeply as she sang "let the whole be equal to the sum of the pa-a-arts...
...country in 1938 or when the Russians organized a Communist coup in 1948. Last week Czechoslovakia's 14,300,000 citizens found themselves in a desperate situation once again, faced with a massive threat to their independence from the Soviet Union and its hard-lining allies. Despite verbal pledges of support from some of its Communist neighbors and muted cheers from the West, the country knew from experience that, whatever happened, it could expect no real help from the outside. In a moment of peril, it could rely only on its own political acumen, patience and resourcefulness...
...ultimate usefulness of the Bryn Mawr "theory" was to make us aware of the phenomenal number of proper names and of specific day, time and place references in the lyrics of the album. Our attack follows two lines of reasoning: checking out the names in order to make verbal contact with a planted clue, and comparing the song motifs to see if a specific time and place was delineated...
Furthermore, Love's Labour's Lost is the most topical of all the plays. In it Shakespeare parodies the euphemistic style of John Lyly (who is today not exactly a widely read author), and lampoons a number of the verbal fads and affectations of the late sixteenth century. It is stuffed with what its leading character, Berowne, describes as "Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise./Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,/Figures pedantical." And there are hundreds of puns, many be-labored mercilessly. How many of today's theatregoers relish extended puns on long-obsolete terms for a male deer of the second...
...must be remembered that the play was not written for the usual public audience, but for a highly sophisticated court assemblage that could pick up the verbal and personal allusions. As Granville-Barker said of the play, "It abounds in jokes for the elect. A year or two later the elect themselves might be hard put to it to remember what the joke was." The "year or two" has now stretched to almost four centuries. It is easy to see why--uniquely among the plays--this one was never revived after Shakespeare's time until 1839, and not successfully revived...