Word: pompous
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From the beginning, Commencement in Cambridge has been an amusing combination of pompous ritual, serious academic dissertation, reunion with old associates, honors both earned and merely bestowed, and festive entertainments...
...house was easily imposing enough to induce such speculation. It stood at the top of a crest overlooking the Charles River with a large expanse of ground stretching before it and somehow had a way of appearing inordinately pompous whenever a Congregationalist should happen by. The neat rows of Ionic pilasters and windows, the classical doorway and the stately scale of the house, contributed to its attractiveness. Now the Master's Residence at Adams House, the building has lost its view of the river and most of its ground but its handsome interior and facade remain intact...
...monk's search for his daughter. Pelagia's conversion seems off-stage and is dwarfed by the reunion with her father in the final scene--a disgracefully pointless ending for an experienced dramatist like Cole. The libretto's simple-minded images ("today I went wandering as a bird") and pompous archaisms (the story is "for them that have an eye to see") deaden the opera still further. The characters emerge as cute Sunday school paste...
...gesture that seems both apologetic and pompous, Graham Greene has insisted that his light novels (those in which God does not have a speaking part) should be called "entertainments." The tag does not fit all light novels, because it carries the implication that the author can write much more deeply when he cares to. But it suits exactly the books of Iris Murdoch, a professional philosopher and former Oxford don. whose only equal as an entertainment writer is Greene himself...
...There is a psychological crust that covers memories, and most people are afraid to break it after only 18 years," says Violinist Isaac Stern. "I could not and would not play my music in Germany or Austria, or with any German or Austrian citizen or orchestra. This is less pompous, I would say, than establishing myself as a private denazification court to decide which particular Germans are acceptable...