Word: florid
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Many readers miss the florid circumlocutions of such erotic classics as Fanny Hill or My Secret Life. Today's pornographer handles a love scene as if he were dictating an engine-repair manual for high school dropouts. Not so the oldtimers, whose swooning maidens entered the amatorial bout with timorous displays of budded rotundities, swelling hillocks, portals of ecstasy and other geographical purlieus quite foreign to Gray's Anatomy. When it comes to a seduction scenario, few contemporary eroticists could match the subtlety of an anonymous 17th-century poet in reciting a pastoral love-in between a fair...
...usual, Beethoven was exactly right. Although Gioacchino Rossini dashed off 38 operas before his retirement at the age of 37, he was long known as essentially a one-opera composer. Many of his lively overtures are concert hall staples, but the musical dramas they introduce were generally considered too florid for modern ears and too demanding for contemporary voices...
...time forward and then reversing it, like the sand in an hour glass. But he places Isadora, the first natural dancer, on a background of numbing artificiality and casts her opposite a series of unconvincing poseurs and popinjays. The baroque scenario -radically cut from 170 to 131 minutes -is florid without being literate, essentially true to the events, but essentially false to the tragicomic character who made them happen...
...Morgan resumed his practice in Washington, D.C. This time he chose the name of a Californian, Lawrence Harris, a member of the D.C. bar who had never practiced there, and he claimed Harvard Law School as his alma mater. He had lost none of his flair. After a particularly florid and emotional summation at one mur der trial, Morgan spun around before the astonished jurors and fell in a dead faint. He tried some two dozen criminal cases before he was uncovered again. Convicted of fraud, he was sent to Leavenworth prison in Kansas...
...fight against Israel continues, it asserts, despite the Arabs' humiliating defeat in last year's war. Each night new Arab heroes are born, fresh revenge is meted out to Israel, a portion of Arab pride is restored. Amid the breathless bulletins and the florid rhetoric of propaganda, there are the underground's customary coded messages: "M.H.: the bird is back in the cage"; "Attention Green Lion: the gift has been received...