Word: pompousity
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...Modest Overcoat. Here you will meet taxi drivers and tailors and government workers and Carabinieri off guard duty at the pompous official buildings a few blocks away. On a particular evening last week, a short, broad-shouldered man in a modest heavy black overcoat, a weather-worn grey hat, came in about 9 o'clock and gave a casual "buona sera" to the grinning waiters, who know him well. He likes to come here often, to talk casually with the Italian workers and hear what they have to say. He came over and shook hands and sat down...
What is exasperating about all this is that the novel so gapingly succumbs to the pompous middle-class standards of its own characters. Inflated Bel, a meddling woman busily climbing the social ladder; dough-mouthed Mungo and his horsy noble-blooded bride; rattle-brained David unable to decide between love and honor-these ciphers are fondled by Scottish Author McCrone as if they were creatures whose experience had intrinsic significance and value...
Cynthia (MGM) is a timid smalltown girl (Elizabeth Taylor) in distress. Born delicate, she is kept sickly by her own unhappiness, her frustrated, overanxious parents (George Murphy, Mary Astor) and her pompous doctor-uncle (Gene Lockhart), who bullies the whole family. Music (S. Z. Sakall) and Young Love (James Lydon) arouse in Cynthia a desire to live-and to live like other girls...
...surface, Forster's tales trip the fantastic lightly, full of comic improbabilities which unite past & present, heaven & earth. They abound with pompous Englishmen on Italian holidays, Anglican curates who sport with pagan fauns, young ladies with good breeding and bad taste. But beneath their staid respectability lurks the irreverent demon of Pan, Greek god of nature...
...wrong: it possesses an animal vigor. . . ." Out of the side of its mouth, the Tribune proudly accepted the tribute: "Comes the dawn. It ain't Orphan Annie. It's the hair on our chest." The editorial staff has a talent for translating the Colonel's often pompous edicts into gutty, readable prose...