{"id":839,"date":"2008-03-04T15:37:21","date_gmt":"2008-03-04T15:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=839"},"modified":"2014-03-06T19:21:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-07T00:21:00","slug":"rushdie-turns-a-phrase-or-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=839","title":{"rendered":"Rushdie turns a phrase or two"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week&#8217;s <i>New Yorker<\/i> had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/fiction\/features\/2008\/02\/25\/080225fi_fiction_rushdie\">a Salman Rushdie story<\/a> with numerous succulent bits. The bit that especially caught my eye:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Bhakti Ram Jain proudly held the rank of Imperial Flatterer First Class, and was a master of the ornate, old-school style known as <b>cumulative fawning<\/b>. Only a man with an excellent memory for <b>the baroque formulations of excessive encomiums<\/b> could fawn cumulatively, on account of the repetitions required and the necessary precision of the sequencing. Bhakti Ram Jain\u2019s memory was unerring. He could fawn for hours.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The phrase &#8220;excessive encomiums&#8221; has a stylistic sonority (some might find it objectionably orotund), and I got to wondering about its other contexts. A Google search turns up <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=%22excessive+encomiums%22\">eight instances<\/a> besides Rushdie&#8217;s use, and Yahoo finds <a href=\"http:\/\/search.yahoo.com\/search?p=%22excessive+encomiums%22\">a couple of others<\/a> (one in a rock music review, the other in a letter of Benjamin Franklin, Dec 21 1789&#8230;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week&#8217;s New Yorker had a Salman Rushdie story with numerous succulent bits. The bit that especially caught my eye: Bhakti Ram Jain proudly held the rank of Imperial Flatterer First Class, and was a master of the ornate, old-school style known as cumulative fawning. Only a man with an excellent memory for the baroque [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2575,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions\/2575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}