Word: pompousness
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Throughout Devil's Disciple, satiric laughter undermines the pompous roar of hypocritical words and the beat of ceremonious drums. Dick Dudgeon, the devil's disciple, reveals the false sanctimony of his family, attracts the minister's holier-than-thou wife, and impulsively offers his life for the minister...
...from the day it opened in 1868. It was modeled on a Venetian palazzo, after Architect Sir Gilbert Scott's original Gothic façade was indignantly rejected by Prime Minister Lord Palmerston as "admirable for a monastery." (It later made an admirable Gothic railway station.) From a pompous exterior decked with 63 allegorical statues to regal suites designed more for la dolce vita than diplomacy, the building was so wildly inappropriate that within ten years after completion it was roundly condemned by a parliamentary commission...
...compleat English professor in his white suit and black cape, his white beard and black beret, driving his white Packard as absentmindedly as he graded green freshmen. Older generations knew better. Professor Lambuth had a passion for precision in writing; he abhorred the vague and verbose, the prolix and pompous. And in 1923, when his beard was black and his energy abundant, Lambuth compiled The Golden Book on Writing, a 50-page bible that sounded positively Mosaical...
...ESTABLISHMENT. Some antic Britons wield the rapiers of satire with precision and glee as they commit merry mayhem on pompous personages and reverential attitudes...
...Breakfast at Delmonico's--1893" tells of young gentlemen spending lively, idle afternoons in days long since past. Frank Crowninshield, longtime editor of Vanity Fair, considers society from 1888 to the post war age in "Ten Thousand Nights in a Dinner Coat." Dividing his recollections into the Rustic, Pompous, Boom and Jazz periods, he notes it was at one time fashionable "to be dull, to be opulent, to be stuffed, to be bored." Society eventually relaxed and dinners speeded up from two hours to 55 minutes. Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish "injected candour where before she had found cant," and laughter "replaced...