William F. Buckley, Jr. is well known for his use of two dollar words. Here’s an example from Tuesday’s National Review Online.
For Thursday’s debate, we are told that at the end of two minutes exactly, bells will ring, the studio will shake, and a fresh hurricane will bring down the roof in Coral Gables. There are those who believe that this will hurt Kerry more than it will hurt Bush, on the grounds that Bush tends to succinctness, Kerry to orotundity, but no doubt Mr. Kerry will have prepared himself to abide by the rule.
At first, I doubted orotundity was a real word. Its meaning is clear: the parallelism of the statement lets you know that it is the opposite of succinctness. Is it really a word? According to dictionary.com, it is:
o·ro·tund adj.
- Pompous and bombastic: orotund talk.
- Full in sound; sonorous: orotund tones.
[From alteration of Latin ore rotundo, with a round mouth : ore, ablative of os, mouth; see os- in Indo-European Roots + rotundo, ablative of rotundus, round; see rotund.]
oro·tundi·ty n.
So we learn that John Kerry is an orotund speaker. He is full of sound; he is a pompous and bombastic speaker. He enjoys hearing his own voice as it fills the air with his bloviations. He tends to orotundity. This doesn’t actually teach us anything about John Kerry that we didn’t already know. But it does teach us a new word.
