The term is difficult to translate, but it refers, loosely speaking, to a work's subject matter, to what it addresses or to what issue has been placed in question.
"He painted my living room," said Roger Corman, speaking of a work Hockney created after visiting Corman's home.
The same farmers who had, a couple of generations back, been peasants, speaking a strange national language, working in our factories, speaking against us from hearths and pulpits yet greeting us warmly and with a practiced humility.
Literally speaking, a disgruntled and out-of-work neighbor — a casualty of the recession and his own traditionalism — shot Bill Henrickson.
The foreign secretary was speaking before a working dinner with the US secretary of state, John Kerry, their French and German counterparts, Laurent Fabius and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and the former EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, who is chairing the negotiations.
Nearly 20 years ago, though, cultural critics couldn't help but consider their similarities: two white guys in the same city, speaking to a working class, were dabbling in a genre where they stuck out awkwardly among its black pioneers.
As she spoke, an assistant worked frantically to prepare me for surgery, having just found a fourth-degree tear, the worst tear you can get in childbirth, one that stretches past the anal sphincter onto the bowel.
For such an additional (embodied) role structure, once it becomes, so to speak, an integrated working part of the larger institution, is likely to be extremely difficult to remove; it is now a beneficiary of the inertia of the institution.
But "I speak as a working class lad who is proud to own a detached house whose garden is smaller than your croquet lawn".
