Word: fustianeer
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...Judaea as verdant and manicured as Forest Lawn. They may have represented Israelites of two millenniums past, but they often looked Nordic; God must have had blue eyes. And they spoke the King's English: King James', with an assist from any screenwriter willing to gussy up his fustian. In these prim tones, the heart's revolution that Jesus preached became an Oxford don's lecture, and his ghastly, redemptive death a tableau painted on velvet...
...designed to be revenue neutral. It would rearrange the tax burden rather than lessen the Government's impact on the economy. By depicting the proposal in ideological terms, Reagan may also risk losing the support of Democratic centrists who are sympathetic to the plan but not to the fustian accompanying it. "The President has to keep his message in single-minded focus," says one G.O.P. analyst. "To the extent that the message becomes diffuse, it will attract opponents...
...cousin Beatrice and Claudio's friend Benedick talk themselves out of and then into love, served up a sexual set-to whose rapier eloquence has inspired just about every British playwright of manners from Congreve to Coward and beyond. While Hero and Claudio played out their fustian collision of chivalry and jealousy at center court, Beatrice and Benedick stood on the sidelines, exchanged waspish badinage and transformed supporting roles into star turns. This time around, Sinead Cusack (who need no longer be known only as Mrs. Jeremy Irons) makes Beatrice every inch the lady of hide-pendent mind. Derek...
...must have fame, fame!" cried John Wilkes Booth, and then established himself as the first of the modern American assassins. Though full of fustian about his love for the Confederacy (he managed to avoid fighting for it, or even living in it, during the Civil War), Booth was clear-headed and precise about the psychic rewards and second-hand renown that come with dispatching a famous man. "What a glorious opportunity for a man to immortalize himself by killing Abraham Lincoln!" he remarked two years before his crime...
...either. Connoisseurs of the genre remember the sublimely fogbound organ tones of Illinois' Everett McKinley Dirksen. In his early career, writes Biographer Neil MacNeil, Dirksen "bellowed his speeches in a mongrel mix of grand opera and hog calling." Over the years, he developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr. Would he criticize an erring colleague? someone would ask. "I shall invoke upon him every condign imprecation," Dirksen would intone, with a quiver of his basset...