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Jun 11
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Steve Kempson's avatar

Hard to believe that Browning, as a Londoner, didn't know what a twat was.

Then again, he probably wasn't a driver.

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David J. Sharp's avatar

I find that the “Tony folk” use of “disk” entirely floppy.

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Nancy Friedman's avatar

I was amused to learn, relatively recently, that the Screen Actors Guild award is called The Actor. So at the SAG awards event an actor may give The Actor to an actor.

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David J. Sharp's avatar

And said actor acts like it’s no act at all.

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Ron Irving's avatar

Regarding "disk," it's quite a common spelling in the world of mathematics. Indeed, I'd say it's quite the norm, at least among US mathematicians.

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

I guess that the prevalence of “compact disc” has driven the k spelling out of my brain. For some reason or other, “disk” makes me think particularly of ancient Egyptian renderings of the sun. 🤷🏻‍♂️

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Ron Irving's avatar

In mathematics, disks can be open or closed. Open means the disk is all the points inside a circle but not including the points of the circle itself (the boundary). Closed means the disk contains both the interior points and the boundary points. Which I mention because another mathematical term, in topology, is compactness, and the closed disk is a compact space (whereas the open disk isn't). All of which is to say, mathematicians speak of compact disks!

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

Faskinating!, as Popeye would say.

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Mike's avatar

Because I am in the throes of studying Old English ("Anglo-Saxon" to the Victorians), among whose vigorous champions was Henry Sweet, I think a lot about how Shaw modeled Henry Higgins "above all the cantankerous Henry Sweet" (Wikipedia), who, as my OE instructor has said, "was anything but". Like Higgins, Sweet was a pioneer in devising ways to record how people spoke, which Shaw turned into "Higgins' Universal Alphabet", as wielded in Act I.

A point of discussion might be whether it was a brilliant casting choice in a musical to use Rex Harrison in the role of a language expert who cannot sing.

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

We’re so used to talk-singing Higginses that, as my friend Kevin Daly just noted, “It’s so odd to see [in the score] notes assigned to Higgins in the traditional manner.” But the role can be sung in full, even if it rarely is.

I read that Noël Coward was first offered the role; when he declined, he suggested Rex Harrison.

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LWednesday's avatar

The visceral reaction I have to the gent who sings -- actually SINGS! Mr. Dreyer -- Higgins on the 2018 Lincoln Center revival cast album is a testament to exactly how ingrained film-Harrison is in my under-50 brain.

On the flip side, that production (and recording) did grant audiophiles with the sublime and oh-so-dreamy Jordan Donica (who was then cast as Lancelot in the 2023-'24 season's Camelot) as Freddy Eynesford-Hill, and treated us to Norbert Leo Butz as Alfred P. Doolittle, so I suppose it's not a total loss.

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Joshua Langman's avatar

Shaw, as folks on here are likely to know, was himself a proponent of "universal alphabets" and simplified spelling. He uses his own spelling conventions — and, more commonly, his own odd punctuation — in some of his published plays. And he did commission, posthumously, the invention of the lovely phonetic alphabet for English now known as Shavian.

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Sheila Fyfe's avatar

AJL's memoir "The Street Where I Live" has some very funny stories about Rex. His voice just leaps off the page.

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Jack Fraser's avatar

This caused me to realise that a) I had never seen a Tony or b) remotely wondered for one second what they looked like. Such a lack of curiosity is unusual in one as nosy as I am wont to be.

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JulieAA's avatar

I am one of four children produced by post-WWII parents whose only self-indulgence was their annual seasons tickets to the San Francisco Civic Light Opera. Not only did they use every ticket every season, but they purchased the cast album of each production, thus ensuring that all of their children would grow up knowing the lyrics of every song in every musical, however obscure. Couple that with the fact that our mother was worthy of the title "grammarian" in her own right, and quite an enforcer in her day, today's "A Word About . . ." essay has been the highlight of my otherwise dreary day.

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

I’m glad I could brighten things up a touch!

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Sheila Fyfe's avatar

This from "A Hymn to Him" never fails to amuse: "If I were a woman / Who'd been to a ball / Been hailed as a princess / By one and by all / Would I start weeping like a bathtub overflowing? / Carry on as if my home were in a tree? / Would I run off and never tell me where I'm going? / Well, why can't a woman / Be like ME?"

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Elliot Douglas's avatar

Inspired me to listen to the My Fair Lady soundtrack for the first time of years at the end of a stressful day. Lover-ly, as always.

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Jack Viertel's avatar

And here I thought gloaming was a kind of flowering bush which was likely to become damp when the mists of May came calling. And me a producer of Brigadoon. Not the original production. In any case every time I hear the lyric it reminds me of Lanford Wilson's line in 5th of July about the spraying the garden to prevent "mildew on the phlox."

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

Which is one of the great throwaway jokes of all time.

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

But, again, it strikes me as impossible that a person who knows that gloaming is twilight would write "The mist of May is in the gloamin'." He had to have thought that it's a place. Had to.

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Joshua Langman's avatar

A while ago, out of curiosity, I made the mistake of paying for admission to the midtown institution known as the Museum of Broadway. It turned out to be less a serious museum, unfortunately, than what is sometimes called a tourist trap. However, they did have one artifact on display that I will remember forever: a framed sheet of paper on which was written, in Oscar Hammerstein II's hand, approximately this: "SURREY — hurry, flurry, curry, Murray, blurry …"

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

Nice!

I’m reminded of the day, not all that long ago, that I was listening to “The Lonely Goatherd” and was, for the first conscious time, enthralled by (somehow I’d never actually noticed it before!) goatherd, throat heard, coat heard, [table] d’hôte heard, etc.

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Ken Grace's avatar

Song lyrics! Writers get a pass, I think, to mess with the language a little. Poetic licence and all that. But when they're known for being fastidious, it is jarring to hear them slip up. Also, even in popular music, where who gives a damn?, some lyricists still get too sloppy. A sequence that has always got under my skin is in the Elton John/Bernie Taupin song Levon: "And he shall be Levon/In tradition with the family plan". It's not "in tradition with", Bernie, you sloppy sod; it's "in keeping with". And if that doesn't scan (which it doesn't), come up with another line, dammit.

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Benjamin Dreyer's avatar

In Hairspray (which I think is a delightfully witty score) one encounters, alas, “Once upon a time I was a shy young thing / Could barely walk and talk so much as dance and sing.” Um, you mean “Could barely walk and talk let alone dance and sing.”

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Robert Arbuckle's avatar

I’ve always liked to pretend that that was a Baltimore usage and so a little touch of authenticity.

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Jessica Stone Levy's avatar

Trademark lawyer here, reasonably certain that the reason for the “statuette” “requirement” is thanks to a zealous trademark attorney’s advice to the Powers That Be not to use “the Tony” as the name of the thing itself lest they risk the term’s becoming generic. Even though it is sorta, as Wallace Stevens said, “not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.” Don’t get me started on the NFL!

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robsdoor's avatar

In related news I have a hypothesis that King Charles will never be commonly referred to as "The King". I think he will remain "King Charles".

The Queen was singular in the public imagination.

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Sheila Fyfe's avatar

P.S. The cape Eve Harrington wears to the Sarah Siddons award banquet... SIGH!

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Steve Kempson's avatar

"Oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor" has remained in my data banks for decades, describing that same Hungarian princess finder. It still gets retrieved from time to time whenever unctuousness is encountered.

That Tony award looks like a fidget spinner for talented theatre folk.

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