The term "isolated phrase" is correct and can be used in written English.
It refers to a phrase that is separated or disconnected from the rest of the sentence, either by punctuation or by its placement in the sentence. Example: "After a long day at work, Sarah was exhausted. Running late for her son's soccer game, she grabbed her keys and rushed out the door, muttering under her breath, 'I'm never doing this again.' The isolated phrase reveals Sarah's frustration and her determination to change her schedule.
There's an admirable combination of wit and dignity in the way Jamal plays, and it extends to his body language - he has an appealing habit of standing up at the piano occasionally to throw down an isolated phrase or single chord, sometimes shouting "hey" or "yeah" in punctuation.
But neither are they strictly poetical: you don't go to Thomas for the vivid and isolated phrase, apart perhaps from the famous, vast, infinite linebreak in "Adlestrop" ("Yes. I remember Adlestrop - / The name"), and the great crunchy end to "The Glory" ("I cannot bite the day to the core").
So if a dance track is to really get you, often it must do so by means of an isolated phrase.
Nevertheless, excellent singing voice quality based on a digital waveguide model has been achieved for isolated phrases by Perry Cook [12,13].
Instead of mimicking isolated phrases, as she did a few years ago, she is turning songs into narrative arcs.
He used not just a live band — an enlarged version of his group, the Bandwagon, which roughed up the music, isolated phrases and bent tempos to its own will — but video, still photography and recorded audio as well.
A poetic spambot named Horse_ebooks that spits out isolated phrases like "monopoly on your radio" or fragments like "33 Dependence on chance may seem a burden and a limitation on fraternity".
The four layers of Sedgwick discourse become a murmuring burble in which only isolated phrases ("We had better times than anybody else," "I don't believe it") float to the surface of audibility.
These are not isolated phrases: the whole film rests on seeing Turing's outsider status and his unique perspective as two sides of the same coin: he is called "inhuman" and "a monster", a man apart even within geeky Bletchley Park; yet his vision and intuition are of universal value.
The result, "Hinge Picture" (1974), translated to the page Howe's visual installations, in which isolated phrases had been offset by the stark white of a gallery wall: the gutter, a unique feature of books, divided the visual "picture" into distinct zones.
Part of me thinks that having these scraps, these false starts, these isolated phrases, find their way into the public domain at the time they were written would have diminished the impetus of, say, Sylvia Plath or John Cheever, to do the work that has made so much of their ephemera fascinating in the first place.
