Word: pompousness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bobby Clark, with his spectacles painted on his face, his trick cane and cigar, amuses those who think that the mock-pompous delivery of big words is funny. He reaches another sense of humor by announcing, before playing the piccolo: "There are only a few of us left." His partner, as usual, is the almost completely silent Paul McCullough, who is impelled by Mr. Clark's incessant talk to bury his head in a desk drawer ("Just getting a breath of fresh air"). These buffoons and Doris Carson, a very personable girl whose adroitness as a tap dancer...
...pompous and slow" is Amelita Galli-Curci's scornful dictum regarding grand opera. The soprano gives vent to this Parthian shot as she strides out for the last time before New York's "Golden Horseshoe". Coming from a singer who is herself neither pompous nor, one likes to think, slow, the criticism strikes the operatic world peculiarly abeam...
This last conclusion seems unwarranted. There are more opera companies at present than at any previous period. Classical music is still the food of the sophisticated. But it is undeniable that the words "pompous" and "slow" carry the string of truth with them. The reason for this lies not in the radio, and certainly not in the "talkie". It may be fund in the amazing excess poundage of the operators themselves. With a Bayreuth baritone dangerously near the three hundred pound mark in possession of the lead role and with an unlimited heavyweight diva to repel his amorous dalliance...
...London's Covent Garden (TIME, July 8). Last week Judith was given its first U. S. performance by the enterprising Philadelphia Grand Opera Company. Soprano Bianca Saroya was satisfactorily bloodthirsty as Judith. Russian Basso Ivan Steschenko sang sonorously as Holofernes but failed to make intelligible the pompous passages done by Novelist Bennett in the Biblical idiom. British Composer Goossens conducted his music which, if lacking in originality, at least proved him a skilled and energetic workman...
Diplomatist Moffat, plump, pleasant, pompous, is no nobody. He is the socialite scion of the three venerable Manhattan families whose names he bears, a Harvard graduate, a son-in-law of U. S. Ambassador to Turkey Joseph Clark Grew. Succeeding Laura Harlan as social secretary to the White House in the Coolidge Administration, he held that delicate post until its duties were transferred to a division of protocol in the state department. Attaché Moffat's most important previous diplomatic work was with the U. S. Legation in Warsaw during Soviet Russia's brief attempt to conquer Poland...