Word: buffoon
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...this man who dares to challenge the Soviet President? Their rivalry has fascinated Soviets and foreigners alike ever since Yeltsin criticized Gorbachev at a Politburo meeting in 1987 and was forced to resign as party secretary for Moscow. Once regarded as a bombastic buffoon, Yeltsin has come to be seen as a serious contender for supreme power, the man most likely to win a free election for President...
...does. A man who doesn't speak English is a man who isn't worth speaking to. Robert Byron, the great traveler of the '30s who wrote so feelingly on Islamic culture, got great comic effect by treating every alien he met -- even an American -- as an unintelligible buffoon; and his John Bullish contemporary Evelyn Waugh all but enunciated a Blimp's Code by asserting that no man who knew more than one language could express himself memorably in any. (Take that, Nabokov! Et tu, Samuel Beckett...
Lightweight, demagogue, buffoon, windbag. At best naive, at worst dangerous. Those were among the put-downs of the newly elected president of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic that came sluicing anonymously out of the U.S. Government on the eve of last week's summit. The name-calling stemmed in part from memories of Boris Yeltsin's visit to Washington in September...
That kind of celebrity has also returned under a slightly different guise during his time at Harvard. In Mather House, Granieri has won a reputation as a some-time buffoon, not immune to beckoning applause. "If it's possible for a conservative Republican to be a kind of flake, Ron is a kind of flake," says Kaufman...
...since Yale is the recasting of Boy Willie with Charles S. Dutton, who gives a performance as energized as his Tony-nominated Broadway debut in Ma Rainey. Puffing his cheeks, waving his arms, hopping around like Jackie Gleason in a one-legged jig, the burly Dutton seems a rustic buffoon. But when conversation turns to conflict, his jaw tightens and the clowning stops. In Boy Willie, Dutton and Wilson achieve that rarity in literature, a truly common, ordinary man of heroic force...