orotundity

Already a legendary figure for devising genomic-sequencing techniques—it must help that he’s a scientific eminence who has the aura of one, with a grand Darwinian beard and a slow-spoken orotundity—Church gained further attention for his experiments in trying to resurrect extinct species, particularly the woolly mammoth.

As the headmistress in “Riddance” says, recalling her girlhood, “My style was scarcely juvenile. If anything, it was senescent, with the gaseous orotundity of an earlier era.”

Parkland survivor David Hogg’s speech captured this sentiment with both concision and a kind of charming orotundity that reminds us that he really is a novice—suddenly convinced, perhaps correctly, that he can change the world.

The book’s 400-odd pages of near-hysterical orotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions:

The self-conscious orotundity of his speech is emphatic but not overdone: he is gullible, not absurd.