Word: epigrammed
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...Dizzy" had going for him, as Oxford Historian Robert Blake makes abundantly clear, was genius. Not only was he a man of spectacular deeds, he was also a racy and prolific author of social and political fiction (twelve novels), master of the epigram rivaled only by Oscar Wilde and, says Blake with the refreshing lack of equivocation that distinguishes his book, "the best letter writer among all English statesmen...
...conscious of what any reading audience wants, to bypass the senses. Maybe he appeals to them too often. We develop such faith in his experience -- such confidence in his brilliantly modulated rhetoric -- that we are willing to accept almost any statement as poetically valid, even passages where epigram takes the place of idiom, and ideology assumes the role of experience...
Kerr often brings off a bright epigram: "Cruelty, carried far enough, can turn into Al Capp"; "Inadmissible Evidence is so many slivers run under all the fingernails in the auditorium." No critic, in fact, pays such meticulous attention to his prose. Indeed, he sometimes sacrifices content to style and overwrites. He trotted out a veritable Noah's Ark to praise Barbra Streisand's performance in Funny Girl: "She's like a grasshopper, a shy one . . . she's an eel on a chair, nibbling at flowers . . . second cousin to an octopus on a chaise longue...
...answer is: very little. Juan Bosch captured the problem several weeks ago in a typical epigram: "These elections are a fine solution for the U.S. but none at all for the Dominican Republic." Free elections allow CBS reporters, as one did last week, to enthuse about "the transition from ballots to bullets." This alliterative interpretation overlooks the fact that there is absolutely no guarantee that this election will change Dominican political realities any more than did the 1962 exercize...
Again a Bosch epigram cuts to the essence of the matter: "I have long known the Dominican Republic could not have democracy without the United States; now I see we cannot have democracy with the United States." For democracy is more than a technically free election. It is a way of running a society. Until the Republic can build a democratic society, it cannot enjoy a genuinely democratic government. And there will be no democratic society until the U.S. ceases supporting and financing all the anti-democratic interest groups in that society...