Word: prolixity
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...three hours he reads, reads, reads ("I can finish a book between 7 and 10") and chatters his reactions into a recording machine. His interest in books dates back to his days at N.Y.U.. where he studied under Thomas Wolfe. Wald did not forget that prolix prose poet's advice: "Gentlemen, never write anything but masterpieces; there's such a good market for them." Says Wald: "That's a pretty good idea for movies too." In 1933 Wald sold a story to Modern Screen magazine, was brought West to Warner Brothers to turn it into...
Opening the proceedings, Brigadier Anwar el Sadat, Deputy Speaker of the Egyptian National Assembly, rejoiced at prolix length in the new freedom of lands "where once Western wild beasts roamed." Getting down to the real business of the meeting, an Indian delegate attacked the NATO summit meeting as "a clear indication of the design of the imperialist powers to interfere in Afro-Asian affairs." Briskly following up that lead, Japan's Professor Kaoru Yasui warned that the aim of Britain and the U.S. was "to explode atom and hydrogen bombs over the heads of the colored race...
Both stories, as with so much undergraduate, or for that matter graduate (i.e., New Yorker) writing today, depend heavily on understatement, although Nash's understatement, paradoxically, is often prolix. The supreme achievement, however, is Arthur Freeman's poem "Whew": in a satire of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl", he has managed to get the muse of the Beat Generation for once to understate herself. This is no mean accomplishment...
Despair & Violence. The week's drama was also charged with painful clinical details. Playwrights '56 made a gallant try at reducing the prolix complexity of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury to the rigid demands of the theater...
Today, in crisis or out of it, activity in the House of Lords consists for the most part of endlessly prolix speeches directed at an almost empty chamber. Of the 878 noble Britons who have a right to 'sit there, only a sparse 30-odd are likely to show up, and there are seats enough for only 300. "The House of Lords," said one cynic, "is a somnolent haunt of aged peers, who hobble in, make futile speeches and then sleep...