Word: balderdash
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Some of his comparative passages, such as his juxtaposing of colors in Western painting with tonal effects in Western music, read almost like free association. Any number of critics could call these comparisons absurd or mystical balderdash. But Spengler has the power to challenge the reader's imagination, as critics of that type usually have not, and he will probably survive them all even if all of them are right...
Bachelor Broadmoore looks like a daguerreotype of Great-Grandpapa. Sporting a straw boater, spats, walking stick, wire-rimmed pince-nez, and suits copied from turn-of-the-century magazine illustrations, he uses a Gladstonian vocabulary, reserving for his strongest expletives such terms as "Oh perdition!" and "Balderdash!" He spurns television, the telephone, central heating, refrigeration, indoor plumbing and all literature published hi the past 60 years. Thoroughly true to his lifestyle, he supports himself by repairing player pianos, Victrolas, nickelodeons, and other fin de siecle artifacts, drawing customers from all over the state...
...army" abducted John Reginald (Reg) Murphy, the soft-spoken editorial-page editor and columnist of the Atlanta Constitution. Among the eventual plans of the American Revolutionary Army, said Murphy of his captors, was one "to engage in guerrilla warfare throughout the country." That may well have been their boastful balderdash and possibly no such group exists at all, except as a fiction to dress up a kidnaping for private gain. But the impact on the nation was none the less. Murphy was returned unharmed after 49 hours and two of his suspected kidnapers were promptly found and arrested...
...which R.W. Burchfield, the O.E.D.'s chief editor, replies, in effect, "balderdash." He told the Philological Society that "we are concerned with the accurate recording of language, not what people think it should be." Burchfield's chief concession to his lexicographical critics has been to include in the supplement's definition of Jew a historical note explaining how Jews became known as moneylenders in England during the Middle Ages.* If by chance Shloimovitz does win his case, the O.E.D. will undoubtedly have other aggrieved readers in the courtroom. Among them might be thousands of irate Yorkshiremen. "Yorkshire...
CAMPAIGN rhetoric is not always up to the level of 1884, when a Republican helped doom his candidate by calling the Democrats the "party of Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." But this season's accumulation of banalities, balderdash, wit (sometimes unintended) and invective is impressive enough. Some of last week's prize entries...