Teachers now dip random phrases from suspiciously erudite student essays into Google to ensure that the work they are handed has had no previous owners.
You can be clever in this sense, by using baseball as an analogy (bear with me) -- and why not as many a boardroom phrase has been borrowed from this erudite of U.S. sports: "ballpark figure", "touch base", "play hardball", "three strikes and you're out", "cover all bases", "curveball", etc. -- we can not only look at sabermetrics (which, ahem, tallies well with web analytics) but at logic also.
A devoted and erudite student of jazz history, Ms. Sherman is a stylistic compendium of Billie Holiday (the sultry, lingering phrasing), Blossom Dearie (the wispy little-girl tone) and Mildred Bailey (the steady swing underpinnings and aura of unshakable optimism).
As well as being an erudite and eclectic historian, he had the eye for the telling anecdote and the pithy phrase that characterises the best journalism.
Mr. bin Laden's Arabic is erudite and meticulous, laced with Koranic allusions and rhetorical turns, like the classical rhymed antitheses of phrases like "what principle makes your blood real blood and our blood water?" (Saddam Hussein's Arabic, Professor Barhoum said, is "atrocious").
Days later, still wearing the same "Tolstoyan" costume, Ms Batuman calls the airline again, only to hear from a clerk: "Are you familiar with our Russian phrase, 'resignation of the soul'?"The motor of this book is in Ms Batuman's erudite enthusiasm for big, chunky, gloomy and occasionally illogical fiction.
Among the words and phrases that she got across using my phone that she could not have expressed otherwise: "Taoist," "Myanmar," "French barracks," "Han brick rubbings" and "erudite".
Sutherland is almost comically erudite.
He was wonderfully erudite.
I said "erudite", Jenkins.
