Word: pompousity
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...exactly what he intended to write. "In the newspaper business it's your duty--your job--to meet interesting people and write about them," he says. "But people think that anyone who has been managing editor of the New York Times must have something portentous and pompous to say. I may be portentous and pompous, but I don't want to write that...
...Stones, this one offered by veteran New York Times cliche-hurler Robert Palmer. This picture-book, large-type text, liberally prepared with color and black-and-white photos of the Stones at their decadent best, suffers from the same '60s-envy that makes otherwise rational human beings mythologize the pompous and overblown Jim Morrison or believe that the Grateful Dead were ever more than a bunch of dope fiends who knew a few chord changes...
...bizarre Nazi Bierabends (get-togethers over beer) organized for the press by Alfred Rosenberg, the official Nazi philosopher. Hermann Göring would circulate, fat, affable and crude; then came the Führer's "somewhat dim-witted 'deputy,' " Rudolf Hess; then the "vain, pompous, incredibly stupid" Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was to be Foreign Minister. Shirer recalls being dumbfounded by Bernhard Rust, the Nazi Education Minister, a bureaucratic ideologue who explained the difference between serious, careful, Aryan physics and the degenerate Jewish physics, as represented by the mountebank Einstein...
...only a movie." At the film's ostensibly terrifying climax, when a school of nasty little razor-toothed fish has launched an attack on a lake full of summer campers, one of the piranha leaps out of the water and bites the camp's pompous counselor on the snout...
Joan Didion's fourth novel carries a few unnecessary burdens. There is the silly pink book jacket, the pompous flap copy ("a precise and pitiless exploration of lives lived in the harsh glare of public scrutiny") and, worst of all, the title, which is as ostentatious as that of the author's last novel, A Book of Common Prayer. Nor is the reader reassured when this most confident of stylists lodges herself as an extraneous character in the book, discussing narrative ploys that she has considered and rejected and alerting the reader to real or imagined difficulties ahead...