Word: parvo
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...furious writer. Despite a distaste for self-revelation, White frequently boils over: he takes after fascists in the '40s, loyalty oaths in the '50s, school prayer in the '60s and commercialism in the '70s. But the author's unwritten motto is always Multum in parvo (much in little). He avoids issues like integration and Viet Nam; the sharpest attacks concern mistakes that are less global than verbal. When the Reader's Digest changes one of his sentences, for example, he fires off a note to the publisher announcing that, unlike the vanilla bean, White...
Stumping the backwoods during one of his presidential campaigns, Andrew Jackson decided to impress his bumpkin constituents with his scholarship, let fly in bear-shaped tones with all the Latin he knew: "E pluribus unum, my friends, sine qua non, ne plus ultra, multo in parvo!" Applause resounded for miles; Jackson not only won the election, but also got an honorary LL.D. Or so says Allen Walker Read, associate professor of English at Columbia University, who tucked tongue in cheek and presented choice samples of fractured Latin in an address to the Linguistic Society of America...
Anna Magnani is notably absent from the cast, but there is good evidence that she is not the only actress in Italy. Lea Padovani mixes all the called-for emotions successfully in the role of the poor girl, while rich girl Elli Parvo manages to appear callous and concerned at the same time. Victoria Duse, as the angular hero, casts his lot with the good people at the required moment, and portrays the true heroic metamorphosis...
Portraits in Miniature is a short book (214 small pages) but contains 18 biographies in parvo. They are like unusually well-written, extremely urbane short stories. Some of their subjects: Elizabethan Sir John Harington, who, "suddenly inspired," invented the water-closet. Jacobean Dr. North, Master of Trinity College (Cambridge), whom illness transmogrified from a scrupulous moralist into a ribald debauchee. The Président de Brosses, the man who got the better of Voltaire over a bill for firewood. Mary Berry, last survivor of the 18th Century, who "could even make Frenchmen hold their tongues; she could even make Englishmen...
...observer . . . has thought of interviewing him, with any sort of persistence, on the subject of his private habits. Ripped up, after being steeped in spirits of wine, he is very well known; acting within the domain of his instincts, he is hardly known at all." That, in parvo, was Fabre's technique- "personal interviews" with his minute subjects. The Languedoeian scorpion (not the common black scorpion of Europe, which is harmless) is a grotesque, straw-colored beast, 3½ inches long, with bony armor and a hard, sharp, poison-tipped tail. Only a Fabre could be intimate with...