Word: verbalism
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...unpretentious, undevious. He looks uncomfortable when stridently attacking his opponent. He appears similarly forced and unconvincing when he makes a blatant specific pitch for votes, as he did in the South with his contrived emphasis against gun controls. While he is certainly a bright man, his image as a verbal bumbler nevertheless is not totally unfair; he is also a man who can forget three times in a day which town he is in, as he did recently in Illinois. Far from an inspirational leader, Ford has a limited let's-not-rock-the-boat perspective of the presidency...
...Pinter at his dramatic best. In this triangular tug-of-war, slow, measured exchanges marked by his famous pauses alternate with exquisitely lyrical monologues. Like the absurdists, Pinter suggests the fluidity of reality by riveting attention on the language that expresses it. His characters wonder at words, make verbal slips and fall silent. Gradually, as the stakes become clearer, the walls of civility they erect crumble; by the end, the ineluctable presence of the past bathes the stage with white light, illumining their loneliness and need...
...revised sections of the test include a mathematical section stressing the ability to work with numbers rather than knowledge of complicated formulae, and a verbal section posing clinical type situations rather than word analogies and synonym-antonym problems, according to Erdmann...
...assistant director of the Boston Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has refused to sign a long-awaited report on Harvard's compliance with affirmative action guidelines, claiming that it does not reflect a verbal summary he received from its authors...
...topical, rooted in the decadence of the late Victorian aristocracy and gentry. But its farcical underpinnings allow it to date unusually well. Wilde's dialogue abounds in inversion and paradox, in the replacement of the weighty with the insubstantial. His characters talk nonsense with a straight face and flout verbal conventions while remaining always socially correct...