Word: donnish
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Turning 25, Japan's slender, donnish Prince Akihito downed green tea and bean cakes at a sedate trio of parties (one with his kin, another with Fiancee Michiko Shoda, a third with 60 old classmates at Gakushuin University), tentatively accepted a birthday gift designed to cement the bonds between the budget-conscious imperial family and a local construction firm: an offer to build the foundations and outer shell (cost: $150,000) of Akihito's new, 45-room palace for a kowtowing $27.78. Apparently more concerned with imperial honor than with imperial bargains, however, Tokyo's noisy newspapers...
...Question, takes the easygoing view that language is what its users make of it. It is usually Critic Brown who is the first to cry Fowler. Both quick-witted, the two men also strike sparks with contrasting personalities: stocky Evans, 52, often rides roughshod over the conversation with a donnish cackle and a rapid, sing-song voice that strikes some listeners like chalk drawn across a blackboard; lean, white-haired Brown, 57, a veteran lecturer and darling of women's clubs, is a courtly Kentuckian with effortless charm...
Side of the Angels. Wadsworth imbued the Guardian with his own puckishness, his donnish verbosity, his love for the elegant phrase. The paper often exasperates other newsmen with its quill-pen essayist's approach to the day's hard news, is designed for those who lounge as they read. It often irritates politicians with toplofty editorials suggesting that the paper is not only on the side of the angels but right alongside them in heaven. Snorted Winston Churchill in 1950: "What a remarkable position of superiority...
Many have turned to Labor's fastest-rising star and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Gaitskell. -The Rivals. Oxford-bred Hugh Gaitskell, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, was once considered too donnish for the workingman, but now at 49, he has become the right-wing trade unionists' favorite candidate against the rambunctious but embittered left-winger Nye Bevan...
...explains that he expected a minimum of intellectual effort from his audiences and failed to write a successful opera because he was unwilling to "speak of his own emotional life: to exhibit naked feeling appeared as a breach of etiquette." Mild-mannered Cyclopedist Blom, 66, also sharpened up his donnish ax on the Queen's English and "made war" on certain usages that irked him. Among the casualties: GLISSANDO, which Blom calls a "mock-turtle with a French head and an Italian tail . . . unfortunately used by composers anywhere but in Italy," and TONE (used for "note" in twelve-tone...