"He had no ear," Brand Blanshard writes of the philosopher.
I did want to be a great violinist, too, but I had no ear or talent for it.
Keene had no ear for a joke, but he was only slightly more tone deaf than many of his contemporaries.
It was delightful, of course, to see Cage talking about his studies with Schoenberg in California, during which Schoenberg, the intimidating older composer, told Cage that he had no ear for harmony and would hit his head against a wall should he try to become a composer.
This was work for her, not Yeats, who had no ear for native speech, and had, in any case, somewhat to his annoyance, been born not into the Ascendancy but into the slightly upper middle class; he hated the bourgeoisie (his tormentor George Moore professed to wonder how he had come so to dislike his own kind).
The biographer Ronald Hayman writes that though a fine singer, "Robeson had no ear for blank verse" and even Peggy Ashcroft's superb performance as Desdemona was not enough to save the production from failure.
Of a poorly written advertisement, she writes, "the copywriter had no ear to speak of ― why, for example, somewhat stale rather than simply stale?" Kitamura, on the other hand, gives us a book that's worth reading for its inventive cadences alone.
"The snake has no ears; all snakes are deaf," he said.
