White Vocabulary: periphrastic
Posted by alex in White vocabulary at 11:23 am | 
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[From Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces, by Andrew Ferguson, review of Donald Trump’s book…]
“Look,” I said to this editor, who is brilliant and back with whom I go way, “there’s one problem. The book stinks. It is a menace. Spend twenty-five minutes with it, and you find yourself thinking and talking exactly the way this man thinks and talks: self-congratulatory, dissembling, superficial, and periphrastic, which is a word I happen to know of which the Donald has never heard.”
1. Having the nature of or characterized by periphrasis.
2. Grammar. Constructed by using an auxiliary word rather than an inflected form; for example, of father is the periphrastic possessive case of father but father’s is the inflected possessive case, and did say is the periphrastic past tense of say but said is the inflected past tense.
adj : roundabout and unnecessarily wordy; “had a preference for circumlocutious (or circumlocutory) rather than forthright expression”; “A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,/ Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle/ With words and meanings.”-T.S.Eliot
6 May, 2006 at 7:19 pm
Yeah yeah….he be gettin all prophylactic and sheeit. I gots me sum big werds in my vacablary too bitch! Check dis shit out! I was walkin down da street wif my peeps and I be thinkin YO! WHat da fuck be wrong wit dem cracka ass ho’s down da block! Dey all be discriminatin an sheeit and begilin a bruthas pedophilin afro stylin. Den my homies say “WORD?” And I be like hells yeah. Dats how i ernzed me da street name Thomas Edistein cuz i be like a genus n sheeit. Den I decide i gots to get mine so i bus’ up a liqua stow. Mufukkas don know me!
7 May, 2006 at 10:01 pm
I haven’t seen any numbers yet. Does anyone know when “english” will be so unrecogonizable as to no longer be called english?
19 May, 2006 at 7:09 pm
to exctaculate the conceptents of what is precieved in accorsanse of what mees and fellow afcan ameecans cans concum. eyes accept the understandance of it beesi
29 May, 2006 at 2:38 am
Did I think when I first read this that it was Donald Rumsfield? Yes.
Did I read slowly and carefully? No.
Does it matter? Not at bit. Both are self-important bastards who want the world to agree with them. Both should be fired.