But half a century, though aeons in computer time, is an instant in the sweep of language history.
First, a hotch-potch of mainly Muslim rebel groups from the north, known as the Séléka (Alliance, in the Sango language), swept down to Bangui and ousted President François Bozizé, committing myriad atrocities on the way.
This breathtaking work, with it Wagnerian sweep, lushly chromatic harmonic language and sumptuous orchestral colors, sounds like a last gasp of late German Romanticism.
What makes American politics distinct from ours is the grandiloquent language, the sweep of the oratory and the belief that, when all else fails, you can rely on... belief.
In a speech at Chatham House on Monday, Barroso will sweep aside his usual diplomatic language to say: "My experience is that you can never win a debate from the defensive.
I wanted to see if I could go on to do a history of the language, the full sweep, texts and all, beginning with those Germanic invasions up to the present Babel of Englishnesses.
Wolfe's use of language, the grand sweep of his story, the way he used science fiction to illuminate ideas and people and to stretch my mind in ways it had never been stretched before, the way he played with memory and gave us a perfectly reliable unreliable narrator – all these things thrilled me.
As the foreign presence, language and customs swept across the country seemingly overnight, the confusion is excusable.
The anecdote in Dunham's book is also quite tame, once one sweeps aside Dunham's visceral language about "carefully spread open" vaginas.
Don't sweep it under the floor with (language like) "this may have caused".
