Word: highflown
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Horned or Cornute. Nabokov's own enormous word skill gives the translation felicity. But his very range of language allows him to choose words which, although exact in meaning, do not give the flavor of the original, generally because they are too highflown or arcane. The simple Russian word for "horned" (Ch. 6, XXXIX) becomes "cornute," which means horned but is not a simple English word. Simple words for "sweetness" and "youth" become "dulcitude" and "juventude" in English (Nabokov excuses himself somewhat abashedly by pointing out that the sense of the couplet-a sneer at moon-June versifying-requires...
...them as a time of kairos-a Greek word for the Scriptural "fullness of time" in which the eternal could penetrate the temporal order. Their prescription for the world was "Religious Socialism." Without a religious foundation, they insisted, "no planned society could avoid its eventual destruction." Not surprisingly, such highflown talk had little appeal either for practical politicians or practical church men. "If the Social Democrats had accepted us," muses Tillich wistfully today, "or if the churches had put their influence behind our movement rather than at tempting to retrieve the old traditional orthodoxy, perhaps Hitler would not have come...
CINCINNATI, Jan. 4--Boston's highflown Celtics had to beat off successive threats Sunday to clinch an 111-108 victory over Cincinnati's Royals in the dying seconds of an afternoon National Basketball Association game...
...physical appearance of the actress playing the role is unusually important, Miss Farrand tries to compensate for her 'shortcoming' by working doubly hard to convey the pathetic shallowness of the character. The shallowness she achieves easily enough, but the pathetic, or fatuous quality, is missing in her highflown acting...
...Highflown trumpeter and highfalutin high priest of beboppers...