Mr. D'Angelo can do his version of pretty playing: nubby, sharp phrases on alto saxophone or bass clarinet that balloon into long and hopeful expressions.
Ashanti, whose tangy voice supplied hooks for hip-hop songs before she made her own album, sang about devoted love in short, sharp phrases that the whole crowd could join.
Even his darker moments are suffused with the inherent comedy of being human and a distinctive physical style that smoothly feeds gesture and sudden, sharp phrases into larger movement structures.
The author of a previous novel ("The White Boy Shuffle") and two volumes of poetry, Beatty has a rare ability to fashion something more than just occasional sharp phrasing; word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, the writing here is seamless and teeming with momentum.
Or is it, as this week's winner has it, a kind of paradise of paradox: or, in the better, sharper phrase of @SamTheBearJew, "Logorrhea, in brief".
One more round of revisions, with sharper phrasing, clearer narrative and more thorough analysis, and Pfaelzer could have sealed off the reader's route of emotional escape.
And it features a lightning-sharp phrase — spoken, tellingly, not by Gaspard himself but by the perspicacious, intellectual Margot — that encapsulates, in two words, Rohmer's character, his career, and his lifelong array of cinematic protagonists.
Belfast newspapers have reported that Mr. McGuinness and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, settled on a sharper phrase about the police officer's killing after their more reserved condemnation of the soldiers' slayings.
The five dancers (one male) get precise, sharp little phrases and slouchy pockets of stillness.
People accuse us of privatizing the university — I say, 'No, the state is privatizing the university.' " Roy began to voice her students' dismay in sharp, sloganeering phrases, declaring, for instance, that they were threatened with a "subprime education".
As she begins her sharp, whipping phrases, her upper body twisting from side to side, her arms wrapping around her waist, her feet rake up small blue smudges in the sand.
