Word: prolixity
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TINY ALICE, by Edward Albee. Life is a many-symboled thing in this opaque play of the post-Christian ethos. Paradoxically, Alice's only emotional vitality stems from Christian symbols and experience. The language is sometimes eloquent but often merely prolix. The cast, headed by John Gielgud, is a matchless marvel...
...dress; they are accoutered, like Achilles, in the armor prescribed by Beau Brummel, who, as every Heyer reader knows, not only taught Englishmen to wash, wear clean linen and conservatively cut clothes, but invented a boot polish with a special magic ingredient-vintage champagne. Its plot is frothy and prolix. Charles Fancot, the second son of now-defunct Lord Denville, comes home to London, after helping his uncle preside at the Congress of Vienna, to find that stormy Twin Brother Evelyn has resolved to get their flighty mother out of debt. As the new earl, Evelyn has an income...
...character, the 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...
...from the passion-tinged descriptions of male writers. One notorious McCarthy story, she writes, "is about contraception in the way, for instance, that Frank Norris's The Octopus is about wheat. There is an air of imparting information-like whaling in Melville." Reviewing Simone de Beauvoir's prolix attack on male imperialism. The Second Sex, Hardwick pricks its Utopian pretension that women are stronger and better than men in a commonsensical line: "Any woman who has ever had her wrist twisted by a man recognizes a fact of nature as humbling as a cyclone to a frail tree...
...more significant than a new sense of freedom from the prejudices of the home office." Strangely, the Review itself seems unwilling to be unequivocal in its critical columns. After examining Dow-Jones's disappointing new weekly newspaper, the National Observer, the Review ticks off numerous flaws ("unbelievably prolix . . .cluttered . . . fillers of trifling import"), then warmly salutes the new paper: "Deserving of congratulations all around." In the same spirit of charity, it finds the San Francisco Chronicle "the big-city newspaper of the future," then adds: "It just doesn't print much news...