Word: pompous
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...humanity ever slumber unless when women are ravished or the Christians persecuted." Today's scholars are more likely to complain that Gibbon was weak on the Byzantine and that he was most responsive to Romans like the Augustans, who resembled himself: "Urbane, accomplished, and occasionally a trifle pompous," as Peter Quennell put it in a Gibbon profile. Despite his limits, unpredictably, erratically, marvelously, Gibbon and Rome did go together. "Gibbon is a kind of bridge," Thomas Carlyle once summed him up, "that connects the antique with the modern ages." These memoirs, composed in a number of drafts, were...
WARREN MOTLEY is an unusually sympathetic Polonius-less pompous than confused. Michael Ladner and Celestine are very good as Polonius's children, Laertes and Ophelia. Each plays his character very young, and the scene in which they say goodbye to each other as Laertes leaves for Wittenburg is a delight-Laertes trying to be big brother while Ophelia teases and hugs...
Without Actually Cheating) to the last (Golfmanship), can easily be absorbed at one sitting. In any of them, it is impossible to miss Potter's point: that anyone can triumph over all the pompous types who hog the center of the stage -the long-winded bore, the authority, the physician, the superior competitor. How? By using stratagems of such seeming innocence and such Machiavellian obliqueness that the victim scarcely knows he has been pinked. Thus one day, playing golf with a friend, Potter asked "a bit of a favor" on the third hole. But he delayed revealing what...
...have been addressed ever since Frederick William I forged a powerful officer corps from the Prussian nobility more than 200 years ago. Today's officers may lose their Herr (meaning Mr.) as a result of a 1968 protest by a group of German noncoms who complained that such pompous jawbreakers as "Jawohl, Herr Oberstleutnant" were undemocratic. The proposed form of address ("Jawohl, Oberstleutnant") is hardly casual, but it has caused grumbling among some traditionalists. The brass generally regard it as a good idea. Nor is it unprecedented. Hitler long ago banned Herr in his infamous SS corps...
Such responsibility becomes a candidate. Marchi, however, was unable to stay true to the pattern he had set for himself. First he made the mistake of calling Jacob Javits a "pompous, posturing ass"-which many Lindsay workers found doubly satisfying, since they were pleased to see Marchi pull such an obviously foolish blunder, and since secretly they may have agreed with Marchi's estimate. Marchi himself had to admit he had tarnished his image as "the Perry Como of politics." And then came M-Day with the Staten Islander revealing himself in no uncertain terms, accusing Lindsay of having stuck...