Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Orson Welles, language maven

Orson Welles, on The Dick Cavett Show (July 27, 1970):

“You know, there are too many long words in the world nowadays. And the younger the people are, the longer the words are. Have you noticed that? It’s a very funny thing. They have a wonderful new hip language, which is really our old Harlem language that I used to know when I was running a theater up there, with a few new phrases, and they’re great and very colorful, but everything else is terribly long. Nobody says ‘I see a thing a certain way.’ They say ‘I envisage it.’ Nobody says, under thirty, ‘I would like to think up an idea.’ They say ‘I have conceived something,’ or ‘This is my conception,’ or ‘This is my relationship.’ Everything is four or five syllables long.”
Cavett’s priceless reply: “You know, there's a veracity in what you’re saying.”

Other Cavett Show posts
John Huston on James Agee
Marlon Brando on acting

[“When I was running a theater up there”: in 1936, Orson Welles directed Macbeth for the Federal Theater Project’s Negro Unit.]

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