Word: bombastical
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Amin's public rhetoric pushes bombast to its limits. He has praised Adolf Hitler and plans to erect a memorial to der Führer in Kampala. Constantly lecturing world leaders, Amin has (in 1973) wished Richard Nixon "a speedy recovery from the Watergate affair"; advised President Gerald Ford to choose a black as U.S. Vice President; told Arab states to "train kamikaze pilots [to] beat Israel"; and denounced Julius Nyerere, the President of neighboring Tanzania, as "a whore who spreads gonorrhea all over Africa...
...poem is in this recoiling; Squire M'Fingal's bombast bursts upon his own head and makes Toryism ridiculous. As the squire blunders on, he defends even Britain's encouragement of Indians "t'amuse themselves with scalping knives." As for General Gage's occupation of Boston, "his mercy is without dispute/ his first and darling attribute." The general tried to seize the stores of powder and arms at Concord merely to prevent the Patriots from harming themselves, "as prudent folks take knives away,/ Lest children cut themselves at play...
...robbery of the Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco and declared herself a revolutionary ("I have chosen to stay and fight"). After studying S.L.A. tapes and writings, Singer decided that these particular messages were probably read by Patty from scripts prepared by Angela Atwood, an S.L.A. ideologue fond of bombast and complex phrasing, who was killed in the fiery Los Angeles Shootout...
America's vocabularies, both public and private, are being corrupted in part by a curious style of bombast intended to invest even the most banal ideas with importance. Discussing his institution's money troubles, a university president promises: "We will divert the force of this fiscal stress into leverage energy and pry important budgetary considerations and control out of our fiscal and administrative procedures." This is a W.C. Fields newspeak, the earnestly pseudoprecise diction beloved of bureaucrats, who imagine that its blind impregnability will give their ideas some authoritative heft. In fact, it only confirms the Confucian maxim...
...worrying about how to get through a grubby border station and about the things that will happen to him if he does not succeed, generates more uneasiness in the reader than any of the new terrorist melodramas. Is the problem that guerrilla theater is bad art, too charged with bombast to seem real, even when real people are dying? Like Western heads of state, thriller writers do not seem to know what to make - money aside - of the Arabs. In nearly all these books, Arabs tend to sound like parodies of Yasser Arafat delivering a hate broadcast...