Persian remained the official language of Muslim India until 1835, and not only its poetry but even its historiography was written in the high-flown manner that exemplified the Persian concept of fine style.
The 19th-century English art critic John Ruskin had a more precise gift of observation, as revealed in his descriptions of Alpine mountains and of the humblest flowers or mosses, but his ornate and sonorous prose was the climax of a high-flown manner of writing that later read like the majestic relic of another era.
Done in the elevated, high-flown style known as Grand Manner, it depicts the subject in a perky red bolero bodice with flared sleeves, standing next to a Chickering piano with her hand on a sheet of music, evidence of her culture and refinement.
The timing throughout was remarkable, and there were many rhetorical monologues in the high-flown style.
To put it in a rather less high-flown way, she wanted to have her cake, and to eat it.
Culteranismo, the ornate, roundabout, high-flown style of which Luis de Góngora y Argote was archpriest, attempted to ennoble the language by re-Latinizing it.
But soon the high-flown style of post-classical Persian was being imitated by Ottoman authors, rhetoric often being more important to them than poetical content.
When Wilson wrote about character and virtue, he didn't mean anything high flown or theocratic.
"We're protecting more than just this dirt," Kyle says at one point, but such high flown language doesn't really distinguish him from cowboys like John Wayne.
His voice is conveyed in the same high-flown, aphoristic, first-person style.
How did you know to end in this manner, and how does it serve to undercut some of the high-flown, and occasionally true, things that are said by Nick and the painter?
