Word: oracular
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...camera is incessantly at low-angles to catch the flash of panties or the roundness of a buttock. One soon learns to expect gratuitous shower scenes and absurd double-entendre conversations. The best films are usually unpredictable, but when all roads lead to the bedroom one need not be oracular to foresee what's just beyond the next hump...
...realm of transcendent absurdity. Such a columnist is Joseph Alsop, prophet of the Imminent American Victory in Vietnam, and a man who has devoted his mature life to the pursuit of chimerical creatures. Nothing in American letters is so tragically commonplace as such a columnist--from whom the oracular grace has so obviously been withdrawn, who has been wrong so many times that no serious person talks or listens to him anymore, but who continues to bowl on in abject public humiliation. The fallen columnist, in his world of transcendent absurdity, can simply invent news; witness Alsop's recent smear...
...Eventually some combination imprints itself on me: this sheet belongs to this rod; it attracts that tank end. It's very much a gamble." (His interest in chance as a provoker of form has existed for years. Back in 1955, he used dice and readings from a Chinese oracular book, the / Ching, to determine the color for paintings...
...Gaulle's speech was stately and oracular in public, it was often earthy in conversations with friends. Like Lenin, he seems to have commented on everything and everybody. On John F. Kennedy: "[a President] with the style of a hairdresser's assistanthe combed his way through problems." On Jackie Kennedy, after John Kennedy's death: "She'll end up on an oilman's yacht." On Harry Truman: "a merchant." On Richard Nixon, 1963: "This man has a great future in store...
...Author Wilfrid Sheed, in the recently published Max Jamison, commented most appropriately when he said: "I am not against youth as such. They are wonderfully teachable. But that they should be teaching us; that we should invest them with oracular powers, read into their shrugs and moans some great gnostic wisdom-this is an American superstition so crass that one scarcely knows where to begin with...