The Hollywood comic and one-time Suede manager doesn't make any catastrophic motivational speeches or aggressively insist I join him in a dance-off, but every now and again there's a hint of Slough's most obliviously offensive middle manager.
From the point of view of those trying to mediate a political solution, the speech was "catastrophic," said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar.
In invoking Pearl Harbor, we're not trying to be alarmist — we're borrowing an analogy the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, himself used in an Oct. 11 speech about what a catastrophic cyberattack might look like.
"This deal is the most immoral and catastrophic deal maybe ever". Although Klein's speech is sprinkled with vocal tics that give away his Tourette's syndrome, he is an enthusiastic and frequent public speaker, especially on Iran.
There was a a touch of lawyerly nuance in that speech – with Inhofe specifying he was asserting that "catastrophic" man-made global warming was a hoax.
The Chamber describes a catastrophic future where companies may hesitate to even operate spaces for speech comparable to public fora, thus causing the "marketplace of ideas" that the First Amendment was designed to protect, to shrink.
He used the "catastrophic damage" phrasing just once, and it was buried in the back of the speech.
/ Locked in a vision / with his tongue stiff as a horn" - seem cruelly prescient; the Swedish poet suffered a catastrophic stroke in 1990, leaving him partially paralysed on his right side and almost beyond speech.
There will be catastrophic economic and social consequences if we fail to act," he said in his first budget speech.
In a prerecorded speech to the Rio+20 UN sustainable development conference today, the Prince of Wales warned of the potentially "catastrophic" consequences of inaction on issues such as climate change and global food security.
