Word: encrustation
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...restaurants swept across the land. The cooking of the Southwest began to eclipse Cajun fare as our high-status regional cuisine--small wonder, when the gumbos, jambalayas and red beans of Louisiana became overworked into clichés. Its most overrated specialty, blackened redfish, is a culinary travesty. Scorched spices encrust the fish and mask its delicate flavor. There were contradictions, too, as Americans pumped iron to stay thin, then tried to maintain status by eating In. This was also the year of VCR cooking cassettes and prepared convenience foods, summoning images of the trendiest consumers sitting down to watch Julia...
...Goff's original sketches. It no longer flaunts pseudo-Aztec mosaic panels; its tower, which looked like a Hawaiian chief's headdress clapped on top of a random-rubble grotto, has been pruned; and the millions of little round mother-of-pearl tiles, like sequins, that were meant to encrust its inside columns have been replaced by cream plaster. Connoisseurs of Goff will also miss the grace notes of his other buildings: no orange carpet on the roof, no replicas of Zen sand gardens done in furnace slag and fused bottle glass. By Goff's standards, this is almost...
...less fatally than oversimplification. Its practitioners are commonly known as specialists. Instead of unjustified clarity they offer unjustified obscurity. Whether his discipline is biophysics or medieval Latin, the specialist jealously guards trade secrets by writing and speaking a private jargon that bears only marginal resemblances to English. Cult words encrust his sentences like barnacles, slowing progress, affecting the steering. And the awful truth is that everybody is a specialist at something...
Desert of Failure. The terrain itself is the real villain of the novel. The "territory" is a dreadful place of waterless rivers where turtles encrust a rock like scabs, and the "so-oopwha wind" reddens the sky with sandstorms. The only hope for anyone in such a place is to get away from it. Feebly, Ferris' daughter tries to escape, but, though beautiful, she is dim-witted and can't pass the exams that might get her a city job. The place is too much for her; the jackals and the thorn trees have won, she wails. Novelist...
...effort to capture this quality of inner release in stone permeates Indian sculpture, whether in the trancelike images of Buddha that reached their peak in the 4th-to-5th centuries, or later in the undulating figures that encrust the great Hindu temple buildings of the null centuries. One such temple figure, Worshiping Goddess, although now defaced and devoid of some of its multiple arms and symbols, would still speak to the devout. Her ample breasts and hips hark back to primitive man's fertility figures; her divine power is shown by her effortless grace as she sways...