Word: pompously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...memoirs, as in the memory of many of his professional associates, Conant remains a baffling and difficult man -by turns waspish and wry, pompous and self-depreciating. He calls himself a "social inventor," but by his own account, he emerges more as a catalyst and a tinkerer. His most influential role was as an educational goad, especially at Harvard, where he was responsible at least in part for such innovations as a revised graduate program for training schoolteachers, the Nieman fellowships for journalists and the general-education curriculum for underclassmen begun in the late 1940s. His greatest service...
...couple of centuries hence and rather predictably envisions mankind living passive and at peace under the tutelage of a gigantic computer named Uni. It doles out compulsory, will-killing drugs and makes the major decisions of every man's life. Yet the characters seem more pompous than drugged. The plot, despite a few captivating wrinkles, is the classic man-beats-awesome-machine gambit borrowed from science fiction...
...stretch, though in the past he has done so. Where a play like Rhinoceros was intransigently original, as the imagery of The Triumph of Death cumulates, it becomes literary, reminiscent; often beautiful, it is eventually muffled in echo. Worse, satiric invention flags, seeks easy targets: political speakers who die, pompous doctors who die. At the end, the plague abates, but Death still waits, for the city and the few survivors are consumed by fire. An arbitrary close. But that's the point...
Fortunately, the general is enacted by George C. Scott, who can sense a character in a gross script the way a sculptor can detect a man in a block of marble. Beneath the pompous strutting, Scott understands, was a shrewd playwright who devised and played a public character for his troops. The trouble was that after Patton persuaded his audience, he took in himself; the author and his persona became inseparable. Scott shows that strange, mad process and demonstrates how courage could become, in time, suicidal. General Patton is too complex a period piece to be seen by the film...
...tubular shape" has been replaced by the single word "husk." Why have I done this? Was it because I failed to keep in mind the original term for that elongated form which suggests to us the oboe? Was it because I found the expression "tubular shape" both cumbersome and pompous? Or was it because the word "husk" leaped into my imaginaiton and demanded so urgently to be employed? The answer to all of these, as you may have suspected from the beginning...