Sinatra fans will quickly point out that their hero wasn't a jazz singer, but though he didn't habitually twist phrases into new shapes or resolve a chorus in an unexpected place he was a big-band singer who grew up with jazz instrumentalists all around him.
He constructed 1989's The Melancholy of Resistance in the same way as Sátántango, using his photographic memory, twisting his way phrase by phrase through a story of a circus with a dead whale which comes to a small Hungarian town and sparks an outbreak of violence.
Walker then twists the phrase into "thrushy-tongue lolling up ahead," pushing words toward their own music.
IF the fox knows many small things -- to twist a phrase coined by the soldier-poet Archilochus -- and if the hedgehog knows only one big thing, then Ignac Semmelweis, the peculiar Hungarian doctor at the center of "The Doctors' Plague," was the essential hedgehog of 19th-century medicine.
Miriam is so surprised she can't help repeating the phrase, twisting it with the inflection of disbelief.
I will twist that soothing phrase to apply to the odds of losing to the Mets.
When you hear a common phrase, twist it around to see if it makes for an interesting book.
In Durban, Brazilian diplomats used a smart twist of phrase to break a deadlock over the legal form of the 2015 climate agreement.
"Boston Marriage" is a drawing room comedy with a twist: The phrase is a Victorian euphemism for a long-term relationship between two upper-class unmarried women.
The vitriolic posts reminded me just how flat the print medium is, how readers so angered by my piece weren't there to see me wink at the screen, chuckle at my pseudo-serious twists of phrase.
