Resting on red velvet pillows, the balls spell out elemental word pairs: "semen-blood," "earth-air," "night-day" and so on.
The superabundance of Shaughnessy's old style here dwindles to a few elemental words, some primal rhymes, stanzas that peter out or give in.
The silence is followed by a brief passage, and on this December night the selection is read by Els, a university administrator, her lilting, Dutch-inflected voice beginning with the words, "There were shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night, and the angel of the Lord came upon them...".. Such elemental words, going back to childhood, and yet such a strange image.
English speakers typically use 11 separate "elemental" color words (including black, white and gray), whereas the Dani use only two.
When sexism is entangled with language at such an elemental level, reforging words takes a great deal of time and education.
We have hundreds of words for elemental phenomena, from grimlins (Orcadian for the "night hours around midsummer when dusk blends into dawn") to moor-gallop (Cumbrian for "wind and rain moving fast over high ground"), and hundreds more for aspects of creaturely life, from airymouse (Cornish for a bat) to zebn-slaper (Somerset dialect for a dormouse, literally a "seven-sleeper").
Our words will be elemental.
His letter suffused me with renewed energy and determination; and especially, a belief in the importance, beauty and elemental, intoxicating, limitless power of words.
And certainly a strong affinity for the body and its functions ties together some of the work here — elemental would be a better word than iconic.
Soon after this recording was made, McIntyre adopted the self-fashioned name Kalaparusha Ahrah Difda, drawing not only from African, Indian, and astrological sources but also from his creation of a word ("Ahrah") representing elemental sonic energy.
This concert, given by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under the Swedish conductor B Tommy Andersson, as part of Radio 3's current season of Nordic music and words, had a decidedly elemental quality, if little obviously ecstatic light.
