Word: high-flown
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This week, as it must to all news magazines, error came to 22-year-old, usually correct TIME. Said TIME [Oct. 15]: "Inez Robb was air-dizzy from high-flown metaphors. Wrote she: 'The world is shrinking like a pair of red flannels in a spring rain...
...Flannels & Black Type. They labored mightily to make magic out of what had become commonplace: the Azores one day, Cairo the next. By the time she reached San Francisco, Inez Robb was air-dizzy from high-flown metaphors. Wrote she: "The world is shrinking like a pair of red flannels in a spring rain." The travelers got back to Washington in six days, six hours, having taken twice as long as globe-girdling Howard Hughes did in 1938, because they went a much longer...
Hardly any of this is as interesting as the improvising that Bendix (materially assisted by Miranda) does with the King's English. As an ambitious nightclub entrepreneur, he substitutes affability for finesse and rides to glory as a Broadway producer, pausing periodically to potshot people who think high-flown language is better than low-blown horse sense...
Established in Reno for the stated purpose of divorcing the former Marguerite Lawler Branyen of Minneapolis is a "Mr. Holkar," who married her four years ago with a high-flown flourish: "Without mental peace I cannot properly discharge my duties as a ruler." Slim, sleek "Mr. Holkar" is His Highness Maharajadhiraj Raj Rajeshwar Sawai Shree Yeshwant Rao Holkar Bahadur ("His Highness the Lord Paramount, King of Kings, one-quarter-better-than-anyone-else, beautiful King Shepherd, Brave Warrior"), fabulously wealthy Maharaja of Indore, 34, ruler of some 1,325,000 souls, possessor of the first air-conditioned palace in India...
Though the play recaptures Anderson's old simple virtues, it reveals some of his ingrained faults. He has resisted for the nonce his usual high-flown poetizing, or at any rate put it to half-comic use by letting an absurd Southern private spout Byron, Keats, Arnold, T. S. Eliot. But Anderson is sometimes wordy even in prose. Now and then he overworks his pathos. He throws in a jarring dream sequence. "His taste sometimes falters. Fortunately his theme, like a horse more astute than its rider, saves him from ever getting too far off the road...