magniloquent

His star power is based on brains and brawn; he can recite magniloquent phrases while also giving the impression that he could fillet an enemy, Jason Bourne style, armed with only a Bic pen.

Boris Johnson has long spun political gold from his magniloquent tongue, using what some linguists and observers say bombastic language, esoteric vocabulary, occasional crudity and episodes of bumbling bluster.

Just as often, her commentary about The Times consists of magniloquent pronouncements like, “The enterprise, whatever else it is, has almost ceased altogether to be a newspaper.”

Mr. Coetzee’s new novel, “The Childhood of Jesus,” begins like a homage to a book from another writer who works the stern and magniloquent side of the tracks: “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the Revolution succeeded by the reign of Napoleon, that meant history painting: magniloquent tableaus — battles, shipwrecks, coronations — in which myth and reality met.