Word: bombastics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Before his interview with Izvestia's Editor Aleksei I. Adzhubei, who is also Khrushchev's son-in-law. President Kennedy made a deliberate decision to speak quietly, without bombast or belligerence. As a result, the two-hour interview, carried nearly verbatim by Izvestia, produced little earth-shaking news. Much of the U.S. press gave it a better front-page display than did Izvestia (see cut),* but President Kennedy was satisfied that he had accomplished his aim of giving the Russian people a reasoned explanation of the U.S. position...
Federal control, beginning with the Food and Drug Act of 1906, gradually cut down the nostrum peddlers' bombast. Labeling requirements forced Lydia Pinkham's heirs to note that her vegetable compound for "falling of the womb and other female weaknesses" contained "18% of alcohol," but they piously insisted that it was there "solely as a solvent and preservative." Parker's "True Tonic" for "in ebriates" gave its victims a hair of the dog with 41.6% alcohol (83 proof...
...sonorousness of the wind ensemble also encourages bombast and superficiality. A band can boom out a double forte very impressively, but too much of it makes music facile and eventually annoying. There was too much melodrama on Friday night's program, and none of it was particularly memorable because it remained flashily evocative rather than intense and expressive. Many of the works thus resembled too closely just that music the band wishes to make secondary...
...stories. The title piece, The Proverb, is about a boy who has been brought up to worship his father but also fears and dislikes him. One day the father insists on writing a school essay for his son. The teacher openly ridicules the effort as a piece of rhetorical bombast, gives the boy the lowest mark in the class. On tenterhooks, the proud father asks his son the grade. Tempted to deflate the stuffy old humbug, the boy lies instead and tells him that he tied for the highest mark. With subtle and touching sensitivity, Aymé indicates that...
...Honegger of the evening is a late and little-known Concerto da Camera for flute, English horn and strings. Unlike the tense and rigid bombast of his earlier works (notably the symphonies and the oratorios), the concerto is a relaxed, graceful, spacious and thoroughly un-neurotic work. The mood is pastoral but placid--suggesting, in Dr. Johnson's phrase, not an unkempt meadow but a well-rolled English lawn...