His was unquestionably the more gracious: concise where Mr Darling's was waffly, blunt where the chancellor was periphrastic.
Other denunciations of America have been more periphrastic ("comrade wolf knows who to eat," Mr Putin said obliquely last year, "and he eats without listening to others").
The Tories, meanwhile, are busy conjuring ever more periphrastic ways of admitting that many of their policies have been ditched.
He was asked, in a periphrastic way, about a tasteless joke he had made in relation to allegations of rape against Moshe Katsav, Israel's president.
Periphrastic verbal constructions of various sorts are also found in a number of other Semitic languages.
The so-called stative of Akkadian used auxiliaries rather than inflection (a technique known as periphrastic construction, as with English "book of mine" rather than "my book") and included a deverbal adjective (an adjective based on a verb, as with the English "achievable" from "to achieve") to which a subject-marking suffix was added.
Its tense system is similar to that of Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, and its use of periphrastic verb forms (i.e., longer forms with several elements) with the auxiliary meaning "to do" goes further than either of these, especially in its final stages.
A periphrastic future of the type shown in English 'I'm going to sing' enjoys popularity in Romance, mainly to indicate a less distant future event than the more formal future tense (e.g., French je vais chanter, Spanish voy a cantar).
Notably, Dalmatian does not seem to know periphrastic Romance futures but uses a form kantuora (perhaps from Latin cantāverō) as both future and conditional.
The latter was characterized by a predominance of periphrastic verbal-noun constructions at the expense of forms of the finite verb.
In the morphology the frequent misuse of the dative case of nouns shows that it went out of use in the spoken language, and the infinitive was replaced by various periphrastic constructions.
