Word: bombastics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...death knell of the city," predicts Boston City Council Member Louise Day Hicks. "People will not comply," says State Senator William Bulger. "They will leave the city." From Hyde Park to South Boston the doomsayers were in full cry last week, and their bombast was directed at Federal District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity. In a 104-page court order, Garrity produced his final plan for desegregating the city's troubled schools-a decision that promises, at the least, to keep Boston in turmoil for months to come...
...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...
Propaganda bombast aside, Ho Chi Minh, dead or alive, provided the crucial element in North Viet Nam's astonishing victory. No statesman now alive, except Yugoslavia's Tito and China's Mao, has so shaped his country's destiny. With his skill, cunning, sense of history and unshakable will, he turned a peasant and impoverished country into a force that exhibited fervor and zeal rarely matched in this century...