Word: pompous
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...forests of New England, into a place fit for God's elect. In the 17th century the Wild West was in the East, but by the early 19th the frontier had moved thousands of miles westward, taking with it the same optimistic, sacramental fantasy, translating it into the pompous and morally corrosive idea of Manifest Destiny. The farther west you went, the freer you became...
...guidance counselor and teachers warned that she might fail, but the tenacious Huan proved them wrong. Now a senior, she maintains perfect grades in honors classes, competes in debates, is on the math team and serves as vice president of the school choir. "I don't want to sound pompous," she says in her accented but perfect English, "but I just had to fight...
Even the American people are starting to invoke "the American People"--read the letters column in your local paper. And why not? It is a phrase perfectly suited to the time. It is irresistibly pompous, containing seven luxurious syllables as against only three for its pedestrian synonym "the public...
...raise the question rhetorically, but unfortunately for me, I actually can relate to the pompous professor. My senior year in high school, I wrote an essay on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in which I boldly asserted that one of the novel's characters, Ras the Exhorter, was based on the real-life black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. I remember feeling the smug self-satisfaction that comes with crafting (what I thought was) an original academic argument. I excerpted the essay on my Harvard application. I wondered--only half in jest--whether it was publishable...
Harry Truman's last Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, drove conservative Republicans to spluttering fury. Joe McCarthy jeered at "this pompous diplomat in striped pants." Richard Nixon spoke of Acheson's "Cowardly College of Communist Containment." In retrospect, the abuse seems odd; Acheson proved a tough, decisive realist who welded together the alliance that successfully contained the Soviet bloc until it self-destructed in 1989. Acheson handsomely reproduces the postwar era, the rich supporting cast and a sometimes surprising protagonist who, for all his bespoke elegance and fop's mustache, knew how, occasionally, to throw a punch...