Told in a different idiom, hers could be a fairly humdrum narrative.
In his coded stories of family abuse and addiction, he brought to the stage a different idiom and a druggy, surreal lens.
The man was from a Tamil Nadu folk-dancing family of a completely different idiom; the woman was American, of a family of Sri Lankan extraction.
Each of the four musical sections is in a strikingly different idiom: one is light jazz; another, for strings only, might have been by the young Benjamin Britten.
In a quite different idiom, Rudyard Kipling's classic The Jungle Book, the story of the little boy Mowgli who is fostered by Father and Mother Wolf and grows up with all the animals as his playfellows, was first published over 100 years ago but it remains a vivid, albeit rather moralising picture of life in the forest.
Every now and then, too, you come across some artwork that expresses Woolf's sensibility in an altogether different idiom, refreshing it.
But at crucial points a different musical idiom asserts itself.
Each track feels like an experiment in a different rhythmic idiom.
Though it was mostly pure dance, with each couple moving in a different ballroom idiom, you responded to the dancers as characters and to their situations as drama.
E uses the pop lexicon as a tourist uses a phrase book, trying different idioms to communicate clearly.
