Word: orotund
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...Franklin, that genial urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than of marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history's stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles. He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with orotund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony that is very contemporary, sometimes unnervingly so. We see his reflection in our own time...
...lend a whiff of aristocracy to his enterprise, Singer relies on the orotund majesty of British thesping. Stewart and McKellen give heft to their respective patriarch and pariah. They make each debate on the shaky future of mankind sound as if it were taking place in the House of Lords--even if they are both forced to sport the goofiest headgear in fantasy-film history...
...self-esteem but not central to it. "In a lifetime of tears and laughter," he declaims with trembling sonority in "Rio," "it has been my discovery that friendship between two men is more important than friendship between a man and a woman. Duller but more important." Bing's orotund tone places ironic quote-marks around the speech, but in most movies he lives up to the sentiment. He has few hot smooch scenes; you rarely see him smolder with lust; his frequent come-ons to women are vamps, comic or ironic improvs on the required movie theme of heterosexual romance...
...nearly 200 years the tale has kept children awake and atremble--or lulled them to sleep with Washington Irving's drolly orotund style. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is still a bedtime staple in tonier households, and with its Headless Horseman hurling a grimacing pumpkin at the head of Ichabod Crane, the story helped create the American giddying-up of Halloween as a funny fright night. But like so many old fables, Sleepy Hollow is chiefly remembered in its Disney version. That 1958 cartoon short, a genial mix of comedy and anxiety, took its tone from the voice...
...race also gives Powell license to recognize and even joke about the ethnic differences in America in the face of both tiresome political correctness and simmering racial hatred. In his San Diego speech he parodied a pompous white military officer speaking in empty and orotund phrases. Then he mimicked a black sergeant talking about the coming war in the Persian Gulf: "We gonna kick butt and go home." Describing an encounter with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at his White House treaty signing with Yasser Arafat, Powell put on a New York Jewish accent. And he even worked around...