Word: outlandish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...style is a blend of Gaelic eloquence, Harvard donnishness and American stump evangelism. In front of a microphone or over a dinner table, he can draw on a broad mental library of recondite words, literary and historical allusions and outlandish bits of jargon to taunt, flatter or flay adversaries. He has stormed the rostrum to denounce the General Assembly as "a theater of the absurd" and to dismiss reports on American imperialism as "rubbish." When something clear and pleasing emerges from U.N. newspeak, he quotes James Joyce to describe the rare phenomenon: "Its whatness leaps to us from the vestment...
Although folk tales throughout the world bear an uncanny and unexplained family resemblance, many of these stories have an outlandish ingenuity that marks them as uniquely Russian. Take, for example, the tale of the peasant Bukhtan, whose habitation was "a stove built on pillars in the middle of a field. He lay on the stove up to his elbows in cockroach milk." Since it is axiomatic in folk tales that the more wretched a peasant, the better his chances of making good, Bukhtan naturally ends up marrying the Czar's daughter...
...worst snowstorm since . . . and so on. Only last week, Washington Post Columnist George Will described Ronald Reagan as "arguably the most gifted campaigner since Theodore Roosevelt" - which, arguably, is the most outlandish judgment since . . . stretcher, anyone...
...awkward passages in The Book of Abigail and John. Butterfield, Friedlander and Kline, with a few exceptions--such as when they excuse an outlandish lie Adams makes to his wife as "an exaggeration made under momentary stress"--edit and introduce the 226 letters with good sense, restoring the parts that Charles Francis Adams bowdlerized in the 19th century, and leaving the grammar and spelling of the originals uncorrected...
...unfair to call it outlandish," he said, adding that the plan is less costly and possibly potentially more enriching than other options currently being considered