Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...period saw the birth of "diversity," a phrase that replaced "exclusively" on the tongues of Harvard men. True, the diversity went only so far (leaf through a 1950s vintage Yearbook some time; a Black face appears every fifth or sixth page). Still, by 1961 diplomas carried situations in the vernacular and not the Latin. A sense of excellence, of self-satisfaction, and of confidence, dominate the reminiscences from this year in Lant's book: "Freshman year I was thrown among brilliant strangers," John D. Spooner '59 writes. "General Motors Scholars, National Merit Scholars from Nebraska, Mississippi Pennsylvania, California, New Jersy...
Such optimism would seem empty if Singer did not test his characters so severely while they achieve it. His no-nonsense prose prohibits moral posturing. All of these stories were written first in Yiddish, a language that draws rough vitality from the vernacular; Singer has seen to it that his many translators preserve the outspoken qualities of the originals. (Gimpel the Fool was rendered in English by Saul Bellow, a rare instance of one future Nobel laureate transcribing another.) And the passage of time has ratified Singer's vision of the living and the dead busily coexisting. The places...
Certainly they are the easiest to get on the radio-"AC" radio, that is, music biz vernacular for "adult contemporary" stations, whose regimented play lists have turned Fogerty's song for everyone into ditties for anyone. On the '60s Top 40 radio, it was possible to hear Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, the Beatles, the Four Tops and Bob Dylan all in the space of an hour. Nowadays, says Neil Bogart, president of Boardwalk Entertainment Co., "they play music for the 14-to-18 audience, the 30-to-35, the 50-to-60, or for white, black, chicano...
...recalled the public theatrics of the poet, an ostentatious non-comformist, a self-described "Hebraic Melvillean bardic breath." He drew together the strident Beat Generation of the 1950s, led the flower children of the 1960s into Eastern religions, hymned the antinuclear movement of the 1970s. Throughout, he sustained his vernacular yet visionary voice-marked, said one admiring fellow poet, by a "note of hysteria that hit the taste of the young...
...renewal, more affluent workers began to alter their monotone dwellings. They painted them in pinks and greens, sheathed them in asbestos shingles, ersatz clapboard or fake stone and brick and punched outsized suburban picture windows into them. This remodeling often led to a complete transformation, to a peculiar, eclectic vernacular that lent variety to the uniformity of gray, Edward Hopper neighborhoods...