Word: turgidity
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Strange things showed up. Subcommittees dominated by special interests issued lopsided reports that hid their prejudices behind clouds of turgid prose. They were, concluded Stockman, designed to discourage understanding. The cargo preference bill report in 1974 was a panegyric to the glories of forcing more oil imports into American ships. The inflationary impact from the higher rates was largely an untold story. Stockman unraveled it and alerted the Republicans. Though the bill passed, President Ford killed it with a pocket veto...
...writing the 100-plus light entertainments that appear each month? "It's not Joyce Carol Gates under a pseudonym," says Gallon's Sullivan. Given the turgid prose style, that much, at least, is certain. Novice authors, in fact, tend to be housewives supplementing the family income, like Parris Afton Bonds of Lewisville, Texas. Bonds spends her day with five sons, ages one to 13, and plots her amours "after the diapers are rinsed...
TASS provides most of the material for Radio Moscow, the Soviet version of the Voice of America. In the past two years the broadcasts have been enlivened by sprinkling Soviet-made jazz and rock music recordings among the turgid recitations of editorials. Radio Moscow propaganda is much less vitriolic than the printed press; a Soviet delegation returning from a visit to the U.S. might be quoted by Radio Moscow as saying that the Americans they met share with them an aim of world peace. The broadcasts in English are now particularly subtle, using announcers who try to sound indistinguishable from...
There is almost a poignancy to Kuttner's clear (if occasionally turgid) readings of the taxation numbers in America. Given the political realities in Washington today, it sounds almost like so much baying at the moon, justified though it may be. Kuttner has few suggestions for the Left in the future, only warnings about the past. He concludes with a revealing discussion of the nation's health and housing policies, and how, liberals would be shocked to learn, more money has often meant worse services. Then again, less money probably would have meant even worse service. Structural reform is clearly...
Other composers have turned turgid melodrama into art--Puccini exhumed Belasco creakers to create Madama Butterfly and La Fanciulla Del West--but Sondheim's score achieves little distinction. It flounders in a pool of notes instead of gushing with passion. Only the lushness of "Pretty Woman," the dissonance of "Epiphany," and the insouciance of "A Little Priest" salvage the first act from musical banality. Even here, the Metropolitan Center's gully of an orchestra pit prevents Sweeney's blazing razor attack from terrorizing even the first...