Lou Gehrig can't mind now — he's had other troubles, such as becoming a one-phrase icon — and Derek, who dislikes fuss, will quickly get us back into the game and the one after that.
I stepped into a nearby art gallery, and the owner, William Armstrong, sent us out of the historic district, through a low-income, decidedly nonhistoric section of the city where we finally found Randy's Bar-B-Q, a stand-alone brick cube where the teenager working the takeout window had a one-phrase vocabulary: "What chu got?" A proper response is "Half-slab of ribs" ($10).
We took one step at a time, one phrase at a time, one act at a time, one ballet at a time".
Soloing on cornet, Mr. Miles was lyrical and sensible, conjugating his ideas in an easy flow, one phrase at a time.
In each one, the artist Cristina de Gennaro includes a brass plate with one phrase, while painting a different phrase repeatedly across the surface of the canvas.
The one exception emerges when Baby, who surreptitiously records the sounds of his life (on a vintage mini-cassette recorder), brings them home and elaborately remixes them, snipping out a salient phrase and creating a sort of hip-hop mixtape using one phrase as an incantation — and does so with an eye-catching array of vintage audio equipment.
Every image of weddings and brides you've seen since the time you were a young child expresses one phrase: perfect bliss.
Given the near infinite flexibility of words to create a specific tonality, even one phrase out of place, one ill-timed sarcastic barb, can radically alter the message we are trying to send.
When a song was unfamiliar, Mr. Ungar played the melody one phrase at a time and the fiddlers played it back, while Ms. Mason showed the chords to the guitarists and banjo players.
There was "the people's mic," an ingenious system of public address: short speeches were delivered one phrase at a time, with each phrase repeated, in unison, by whoever happened to be standing nearby.
I never do more than one phrase at a time.
