Aeolistic

See also: aeolistic

English

Alternative forms

• aeolistic

Etymology

Coined by Jonathan Swift from Aeolus, the Greek god of wind.

Adjective

Aeolistic (comparative more Aeolistic, superlative most Aeolistic)

1. Pertaining to superfluous rhetorical flourishes; long-winded; bombastic.
   • 1965, Arnold M. Ludwig, The importance of lying, page 121:

     The propagandists, advertisers, diplomats, lawyers, politicians, and academicians rank high in the Aeolistic hierarchy, and their distorted and empty pronouncements currently play an important role in determining and forming our system of values and beliefs.

   • 1972, James Leslie Woodress, American Literary Scholarship, page 181:

     This makes the narrator intentionally complex: "The Aeolistic narrator is a historian whose work involves, as an allegory, a satiric attack on political Aeolism and includes, as a casebook of bombast, a similar attack on Aeolistic historians..."

   • 1992, David Durant, “Aeolism in Knickerbocker's A History of New York”, in On Humor:

     Even his letters, on the few occasions when he has recourse to such devices, are free of Aeolistic flourishes: "neither couched in bad Latin, nor yet graced by rhetorical tropes" (p. 252)

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