Word: orotundity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nearly 200 years the tale has kept children awake and atremble--or lulled them to sleep with Washington Irving's drolly orotund style. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is still a bedtime staple in tonier households, and with its Headless Horseman hurling a grimacing pumpkin at the head of Ichabod Crane, the story helped create the American giddying-up of Halloween as a funny fright night. But like so many old fables, Sleepy Hollow is chiefly remembered in its Disney version. That 1958 cartoon short, a genial mix of comedy and anxiety, took its tone from the voice...
...race also gives Powell license to recognize and even joke about the ethnic differences in America in the face of both tiresome political correctness and simmering racial hatred. In his San Diego speech he parodied a pompous white military officer speaking in empty and orotund phrases. Then he mimicked a black sergeant talking about the coming war in the Persian Gulf: "We gonna kick butt and go home." Describing an encounter with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at his White House treaty signing with Yasser Arafat, Powell put on a New York Jewish accent. And he even worked around...
...Giamatti, the exuberant intellectual fleeing Yale for the greener pastures of baseball, who dominates the book, as Reston paints a complex portrait of a flawed but fascinating administrator a bit too taken with his own public image. Still, Reston indulges in too much quotation of Giamatti's orotund utterances on the cosmic meaning of baseball and provides too little insight into the off-the-field politics of the game itself...
Despite the mounting unease about his leadership, Dinkins remains unfazed. His response last week to demands that he publicly condemn the Watkins murder was characteristically orotund. Quoth the mayor: "I say that if two nations are in dispute and one diplomat says to the representative of another government, 'Her Majesty's government is exceedingly distressed,' everybody knows that means we're mad as hell. Now, however, I'm prepared to say I'm mad as hell, not simply 'We're exceedingly distressed...