Word: vernacular
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While the phrase "That's so gay" seems to have permanently entered the (straight) teen vernacular, at many schools it is now profoundly uncool to be seen as anti-gay. Straight kids meet and gossip and find hookups on websites like facebook.com where a routine question is whether they like guys or girls or both. When Savin-Williams surveyed 180 young men ages 14 to 25 for an earlier book, "... And Then I Became Gay," he found that nearly all had received positive, sometimes enthusiastic, responses when they first came out. (Many others are received with neutrality, even boredom: University...
...sound, fury and fund raising, Geldof has been dubbed "St. Bob" by the press. He has been denounced by Britain's splenetic right-wing Member of Parliament, Enoch Powell, as a "crypto-imperialist" and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Certainly Geldof s lively penchant for the vernacular would make for a salty acceptance speech in Oslo, but any wishful, wistful speculation about the award's being grabbed by a rocker should not steer clear of the main point. Rock music, the most formidable force in Western popular culture, found a focus and a conscience this year...
...this vernacular habit? Benjamin Franklin called it “modest diffidence,” advising orators to avoid “the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken.” A spoonful of humility, Franklin argued, helps the assertion go down...
...divining the largely unwritten rules that gave the streets their peculiar character and coherence. Former members of the glitzy neomodern firm Arquitectonica, Duany and Plater-Zyberk produced a set of building instructions for Seaside that require in effect a revival of prewar folk architecture, a sort of cracker vernacular. Says Davis: "Our motto is 'Don't invent anything...
...medieval English miracle, or mystery, plays, chiefly the York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry cycles, but the visual imagery is imaginatively modern: God sits in judgment on a whirling metal cage of a world, and Jesus ascends into heaven on a forklift truck. Director Bill Bryden has preserved the vernacular tone and naive simplicity of the originals and has staged the action so that much of the audience can mingle with the actors. The atmosphere is festive yet never trivial, and whatever a spectator's religious convictions, the cumulative power of the story is overwhelming. --By William A. Henry...