Word: floridation
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Austerity has tended to lose the fight to pizzazz. Shaker furniture makers eventually abandoned pure folk simplicity; Arts and Crafts yeomanry gave way to florid reproductions. Yet by the 1920s, both modes had been supplanted by a new phenomenon: the cult of the machine. Technology cast its spell over the national imagination, and the idea of the future became palpable...
...show turns darker and funkier, with a lot of smoke bombs and jungle-queen strutting in silhouette, toward something like a 14-year-old's florid conception of adult sexuality. Madonna comes onstage with a big portable stereo boom box and goes into a routine that sounds like the dirty jokes that eighth-graders giggle over. "Every lady has a box," she says. "My box is special. Because it makes music. But it has to be turned on." Adults wince, but the youngsters love it. "I like the way she handles herself, sort of take it or leave it," says...
...people: those who divide things into two categories and those who do not. Vladimir Nabokov is the first kind. In one of his earliest U.S. lectures, the Russian emigre told his classes at Stanford University that there were, essentially, "verb plays and adjective plays, plain plays of action and florid plays of characterization...
...book contains no sex, drugs or florid writing, but it is a best seller on college campuses all the same. Titled simply Economics, the classic textbook by Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson has sold nearly 4 million copies since its 1948 debut. In the twelfth version, published last week by McGraw-Hill ($32.95), Samuelson for the first time has a co-author, Yale Professor William Nordhaus, who served on President Carter's Council of Economic Advisers. Samuelson, 69, who will retire in May from his professorship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chose Nordhaus, 43, to help keep the book timely...
...this point, Carter's florid, energetic style begins turning an already complicated narrative into a three-ring extravaganza. As if the local color of Imperial Russia and a weird group of invading performers were not enough, obscure allusions begin clamoring for attention. One of the star acts in Colonel Kearney's circus is "Lamarck's Educated Apes." This Monsieur Lamarck is a wife beater and a drunk; he also bears the name of the French naturalist whose theory of evolution through the transmission of acquired learning was overturned by Darwinism. So the new Lamarck's chimps get smart enough...