Word: highflown
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...saddle maker and clock mender, switched to portraiture only after he discovered that he could earn as much as ?10 per painting, which was much "better than with my other trades." When he went to London to perfect his technique with Benjamin West, he was irritated by the highflown esthetic palaver that he heard. "It is generally an adopted opinion," he noted disdainfully, "that genius for the fine arts is a particular gift and not an acquirement...
Horned or Cornute. Nabokov's own enormous word skill gives the translation felicity. But his very range of language allows him to choose words which, although exact in meaning, do not give the flavor of the original, generally because they are too highflown or arcane. The simple Russian word for "horned" (Ch. 6, XXXIX) becomes "cornute," which means horned but is not a simple English word. Simple words for "sweetness" and "youth" become "dulcitude" and "juventude" in English (Nabokov excuses himself somewhat abashedly by pointing out that the sense of the couplet-a sneer at moon-June versifying-requires...