Unfortunately, nearly all the "sights" in America fall under the head of conditions. Hollywood, Reno, the sharecroppers' homes in ...the South, the mining towns of Pennsylvania, Coney Island, the Chicago stockyards, Macy's, the Dodgers, Harlem, even Congress, the forum of our liberties, are spectacles rather than sights, to use the term in the colloquial sense of "Didn't he make a holy spectacle of himself?" An Englishman of almost any political opinion can show a visitor through the Houses of Parliament with a sense of pride or at least of indulgence toward his national foibles and traditions. The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner's visit to Congress--these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mormon colonization south of this point in early times was characterized as "going over the Rim," and in colloquial usage the same... phrase came to connote violent death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not... the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was ...nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »