Word: donnish
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...this is faintly bemusing to Callenbach, a tall, donnish man who edits nature books and the scholarly movie magazine Film Quarterly at the University of California Press. Part prophet and part cranky critic, he is in demand these days as a speaker at gatherings of ecologists and government planners. "People ask me, 'How could such a world come about?' I use the example of the vast change in smoking behavior in this country, which is a paradigm of the way in which social change toward Ecotopian patterns is happening and is going to happen. When you give people a choice...
There was nothing donnish about Orwell's interest in language. He realized that the manipulation of speech could be every bit as deadly as the bearing of arms. He reminded all who would listen that Hitler had risen to power in Germany through persuasion; that Stalin had obscured massive crimes through the smokescreen of invective. He also warned, on the eve of World War II, that matters could deteriorate: "The terrifying thing about the modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown...
...Helmut Kohl replaces Helmut Schmidt as Chancellor, West Germans may notice be shift in political substance soon enough, but the change in style will be immediate. Towering (6 ft. 4 in.), bespectacled and multijowled, Kohl has a folksy manner that contrasts sharply with the coolly autocratic air of the donnish Schmidt. Unlike the Chancellor, who is a first-rate orator in both German and English, Kohl has an unfortunate tendency, as one journalist put it, to use "ten sentences when one will do." And if Schmidt is ill at ease among crowds, Kohl likes nothing better than to press...
GREAT MOMENTS IN ARCHITECTURE by David Macaulay Houghton Mifflin; $11.95 After Sorel's frontal assaults, David Macaulay's Great Moments in Architecture seems gentility itself. But within its spiderweb style, a donnish whimsy examines the excesses of this and other centuries and finds them wanton. Archaeologists uncover the ruins of a rudimentary civilization: a partially excavated fast-food restaurant with the French fries still intact. An inflatable cathedral is invented for tourists who want a distinguished setting at a moment's notice. The secret of the Pyramids is revealed: the ancient Egyptians wanted to sharpen their giant...
...emblem is an owl. His name is George Smiley and he is by all standards a most incongruous symbol. The man is a perpetual cuckold. He is portly, rumpled, bespectacled, with a tendency to puff when ascending stairs and to polish his glasses with his tie. He is donnish and vague. He is also the premier spy of his time...