Word: aphoristic
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...regular incandescent. But you also gain something precious when you buy a compact fluorescent: status. When your friends see the bulb screwed into the socket of your lamp, many of them will think you're a better, more socially conscious person (which you may well be). And as the aphorist Publilius Syrus wrote a couple thousand years ago, "A good reputation is more valuable than money...
...reason, as even a cursory rereading of Mere Christianity attests, is that despite a certain datedness of style and reference, Lewis' brief for Christian belief is superbly organized and easy to follow. He was not a great aphorist, but he had a genius for the deceptively homey metaphor (the book abounds with pennies, trains, mousetraps, pianos) and the extended polemical line that detonates in climaxes such as his rejection of the idea of Jesus as primarily a moral tutor: "You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon...
Some of Dubuffet's subjects, like Jean Paulhan, had impeccable Resistance records. Others, like Paul Leautaud -- a brilliant aphorist -- decidedly did not. So when Dubuffet put a portrait of Leautaud, wrinkled like a tortoise or (as his title had it) "a red-skinned sorcerer," into the same portrait show as Paulhan or his friend the painter Jean Fautrier, what was he up to? Ironizing, certainly, on the idea of the portrait as effigy of virtue. But also -- despite his often repeated claim to reject tradition absolutely -- paying complete homage to an earlier French artist: Honore Daumier, whose tiny clay effigies...
...time he would construct a formidable "character" to mask his shyness: Degas the solitary, the feared aphorist, the Great Bear of Paris. He never married -- "I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, 'That's a pretty little thing,' after I had finished a picture." He had a reputation for misogyny, mainly because he rejected the hypocrisy about formal beauty embedded in the salon nudes of Bouguereau or Cabanel -- ideal wax with little rosy nipples. "Why do you paint women so ugly, Monsieur Degas?" some hostess unwisely asked. "Because, madam, women...
...known as translatese. Hence its lack of poetic rhythm, its inability to leave the ground. And when our poets do know how to write verse, they often pitch their tone very low as if to assure us that their lines will require no emotional response." Lytton Strachey, recalls the aphorist, once told him that Horace could not be a good poet because everything he wrote was a platitude. "This is the Romantic view of poetry, for in fact it requires a very great poet to make platitudes come alive, since they are sentiments we once felt but, through the dulling...