Word: orotund
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...around the world. Broadcast journalism's collective impact on the civil rights movement, Viet Nam and Watergate more than matched Murrow's exposure of the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Moreover, Murrow's work for CBS was not without flaw. His intonations and gestures were often stagy, his language orotund, his judgments pious. He squandered a lot of time on cozy, sometimes rehearsed celebrity interviews for Person to Person. Far more than any of his heirs, he let his personality and politics become a part of the story, particularly during the McCarthy...
...Figure Representing the Black Race has a formal strength to match its chthonic allegorical power; it makes you realize what levels of graphic sophistication lay beneath the populist surface. Such is Rivera at his best, but even at his worst the man's kitsch and bad taste have an orotund wholeheartedness that seems endearing. His mock-surrealist landscapes of the 1940s, together with some of his more contrived social portraits, are rubbish, but they do not spoil the cumulative effect of the show...
Science fantasy is an act of subversion disguised as a fairy tale. In primal imagery and orotund cadences it sets the young imagination on a children's crusade against malevolent power. It describes a vicarious rite of passage through bloodshed and anarchy to heroic manhood; it upends the prevailing social order to establish a new moral equilibrium. For the generation of budding revolutionaries in the 1960s, Frank Herbert's Dune was a magical mystery trilogy that, along with The Lord of the Rings and the Gormenghast books, galvanized the spirit like a Disney Das Kapital. In Dune, rival...
...Salvador, alternatives to the federal income tax, the strength of the Soviet navy. On a typical day, Kahn moved from seminars to informal discussions spouting such iconoclastic judgments as "The nuclear freeze is immoral" and "The welfare economy is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Such orotund pronouncements often infuriated critics, who charged that Kahn was more interested in glib provocation than reflective analysis...
...celebrity endorser had seemed snug in his position, it was oracular, orotund Orson Welles, 66, who boasted that Paul Masson Vineyards let nothing go "before its tune." But the winemaker let Welles go, and has now replaced him as spokesman with that quintessential enunciator Sir John Gielgud, 78, whose first two ads put him in an art gallery and amid a forest of pro football players. Gielgud, who has been cashing in just a teensy bit on his posi-Arthur cachet, would seem more at home with a Mouton-Rothschild than a Masson party jug. But the vint ner insists...