reader submission #2

Cameron:

Your comment on Laurent “Corpulent Despot” Kabila reminded me of another classic example of a journalistic epithet like that, also bestowed on an African dictator. That was back in the ’70s when either Time (or Newsweek, one of them . . .) referred to Idi Amin as a “strutting martinet”. When an epithet like that is so apt that people remember it 30 years later, you’ve probably earned it.

I also like the line about the Franks being driven “back into their morasses”. I agree that it’d be hard to work that entire line into normal conversation, but there are metaphoric morasses around, into which people could be described as “driven back”. That’s certainly a rhetorical flourish, and literary reference, that can be used and re-used. One just has to leave the Franks aside.