Word: floridity
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Nation's Spearhead. The philosophy behind the S.A.O. is a muddle of authoritarian, imperialist and populist ideas. S.A.O. propaganda is the sort often found in flights from reality?orotund, florid, declamatory, and so ecstatic as to approach hysteria. Communists delight in identifying themselves historically with Spartacus and his slave revolt; the S.A.O. officers see themselves as Roman legionnaires holding off the Red barbarians on the marches of empire and sending back semaphore messages warning Rome?or rather, Paris?to "beware of the anger of the Legions!" A typical S.A.O. manifesto recalls French soldiers fallen in colonial wars: "Our dreams...
This same national touchiness is continually displayed by Red Boss Enver Hoxha, and represents much of his strength. Albanians have a Mediterranean fondness for florid and denunciatory speeches, and Hoxha is recognized even by his enemies as a master of this sort of oratory. Tall and handsome, with thick, pomaded hair now greying at the temples, Hoxha draws stormy applause for his insults to Khrushchev...
...group come to the public equipped with the same technique or bearing the same musical gifts. The Sutherland fans fortunate enough to crowd into the Met last week heard and witnessed the best modern demonstration of bel canto singing-which has come to mean the florid, highly ornamented vocal style that almost became extinct a century ago. Sutherland, 35, has brought new life to bel canto. Says she, in her breezy Australian style: "I love all those demented old dames of the old operas." The attraction is understandable, for Sutherland has just the voice to do the old dames justice...
...film company, hired tutors and drama coaches, the best scenarists, set designers, and directors to help shape his Galatea. For the opening of her first film, Cecilia of the Pink Roses, in 1918, he had the theater ventilating system loaded with attar of roses, bathing the audience in florid scent. His newspapers, of course, hailed the new star's birth with eight-color superlatives in reviews that ran under eight-column headlines...
...down-the-line party regular, Levitt was the organization leaders' logical choice to buck Wagner in the primary. Accepting the bosses' decision, Levitt amiably announced that he had received a popular "mandate." Where Wagner's platform style is spare and uninspired, Levitt's is florid and uninspired...