Word: purrs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When I was a U.S. Senate page boy years ago, we took particular delight when Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois rose to speak. He was one of the last great American orators, given to decanting recondite vocabulary from his quivering basset's jowls. Fustian emerged in a sepulchral purr...
Dirksen's oratory became, in the end, something of a mountebank performance. William F. Buckley Jr., on the other hand, though capable from time to time of the polysyllabic Dirksen purr, has used public speech for the most serious of intellectual purposes, as a sharply civilized weapon, an instrument of instruction and correction. This, when one is talking politics, is unusual. A protest without a program is mere sentimentality, as a political theorist wrote. Buckley's opinions have always proceeded not from emotion but from a structure of thought - agree with it or not. He appeals to the standard...