What is a deipnosophist?

Posted by Nicholas Gruen on Thursday, January 10, 2008

Find out if you want to by clicking through when the word appears in this rather fun review of Christopher Hitchens.  Not that Christopher is either my cup of tea or especially interesting.  But he is quite fun to watch - so long as you don’t devote much time to it!



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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 10:53 AM and filed under Literature, Media, Politics - international. Follow comments here with the RSS 2.0 feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

6 Responses to “What is a deipnosophist?”

  1. Chris Lloyd said:

    This Neil Fitzgerald isn’t a shabby wordsmith himself. I particularly loved the following descriptions of Hitchens.

    Red-eyed from a continual cocktail hour and spoiling for an intellectual ruckus.

    He bides his time, sucking in his top lip, drawing breath and failing to suppress snorts of indignation or derision. A cartoon bull, he claws the earth with his hooves as the toreador waves a red flag in his face.

  2. Nicholas Gruen said:

    Yes, I had meant to imply that in what I’d written, but was a bit too sotto voce about it. I thought he was lightly sending Hitch up with his choice of style.

  3. Niall said:

    I lose interest in articles which use five words where one would do. What’s the upshot?

  4. Jacques Chester said:

    The upshot is that the author wishes he was as smart as Hitchens.

  5. Nicholas Gruen said:

    The author doesn’t use five words where one would do. He uses words you (and I) don’t know the meaning of. Which can be fun - at least if they’re good words.

  6. Niall said:

    Hmmm……..I don’t regard Hitchens as ’smart’ JC. Bombastic perhaps, and maybe smart as in Alec, but that’s about it.

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