In "Secrets," a ballad, Mr. Rava began a solo, the rhythm section went into double time, and his aggression came forward: he played loud, short, pointed phrases, and Mr. Bollani and Mr. Motian locked into a groove.
As she sees it, the words that will greet viewers of the Whitney piece — from simple but pointed phrases ("You belong here") to references to the area's history ("From blood to meat, to leather, to flesh, to silk") — are less about condemnation than reflection, even if they still have a political point of view.
His excellent song I Pity the Country rightly opens the whole collection, listing indignities with his pointed phrasing and weary warmth.
As is his custom, he sprinkles his prose with lucid and arresting examples; he can be hilarious, with a pointed phrase, here lambasting the post-modernists, there the creationists.
But the pointed phrasing that suited the Bach and the Mozart sounded clipped and mannered here, and even more so in his oddly lethargic, sparsely nuanced Rondo, the speedy finale of which was not entirely under his fingers.
The pointed phrasing fed into parents' bubbling anxiety about the Core, more fully known as the Common Core State Standards Initiative, an education push that aims to make sure students across the United States are learning the skills they need to succeed in a global economy.
Conversational stickers, such as "hi" and "bye" that can be used in everyday chats, are much more successful than stickers with more pointed, topical phrases. .
Maxims and other pointed and epigrammatic phrases of the sort the ancient Romans called sententiae can become too sophisticated or can too obviously strive for effect.
Despite good moments, telling stories or pointed turns of phrase, the stop-start format takes the story away from the dancers.
That book, with its grammatically pointed title (the phrase, of course, is "where I am from"), was published in 2003, but she had tried to write it thirty years earlier.
Mr. Peled gamely did both, and when Hindemith left the cello line free and clear, in the two sweetly melodic Andante con moto sections, he seized the moment, playing with a seductive timbre and an emotionally pointed approach to phrasing that made you want to hear him again in a more conventional work.
