Sententious

sententious







Y

D



–adjective 

1. abounding in pithy 

aphorisms 

or 

maxims: a sententious book.  



2. given to excessive moralizing; self-righteous.

3. given to or using pithy sayings or maxims: a sententious poet. 

4. of the nature of a maxim; pithy. 





C



sentient, sententious (adjs.) 

 

These words are unrelated but frequently confused. 



Sentient (from the Latin sentire, "to sense, to feel') means "to be aware." 



Sententious comes from a Ciceronian (西塞羅) word spelled almost the same way, meaning "full of meaning." 



Chaucer’s wise elders were "full of hye sentence"—hence the usual modern pejorative sense of sententious: "full of moralistic and possibly righteous wisdom" and thus "preachy."





　

Well, there are three commonplaces on which it repeatedly riffs. 



One is what you might call the romantic-pathetic theory of imagination: any alternative reality that we design and furnish, when we conceive a work of art, is always to some extent a stand-in for the puny or pitiful one that we have been personally landed with. 



The second and most imperishable truth is: we grow old, and perish. 



And the third says: all you need is love. 





These are noble principles to pursue; unless the pursuit is waged with gusto, however, it threatens to slump into the sententious, and that is what happens here. 



With so much screen time being allotted to Caden’s bad marriage and pustular health problems, his majestic production doesn’t get going properly until the second half of the film, and by then we don’t care enough (worse still, we don’t know enough, such is the vagueness of its guiding rubric) to mind whether it [triumphs] or [flops]. 





Compare Dennis Potter’s great mini-series of the nineteen-eighties, "The Singing Detective," and you will see much the same setup—a wry leading man with a skin disease, inspired by a furious creative itch—rendered with unstinting vigor. 



And, should you still have a taste for the fancies of a fading man, try Orson Welles’s "The Immortal Story,"” or a little picture of his called "Citizen Kane," all of which, I sometimes think, could be floating within Kane’s cranium, like snow inside a globe. 





In each case, there is joy—not just a mournful snickering, as carried in Charlie Kaufman’s bag of tricks, but the breath of divine pleasure—in the conjuring of dreams. If you want to show a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, go right ahead, but give that hour all the life you can. 





gnomic

aphorism (short, wisdom)

adage (old saying accepted as a truth)

apothegm (terse)

maxim (concise statement of a principle, truth or rule of conduct, 座右銘是也) rudder

proverb (folksy, widely accepted)

(old) saw (familiar saying, sometimes distorted)



motto

a maxim adopted as an expression or purpose of 

often inscribed on a badge, banner

Punk rock's first great embodiment of the motto "live fast and die young," Sid Vicious joined The Sex Pistols when they were already established as the most controversial rock band in British history

Its motto instead could be, "Girls just wanna have fun."

truism

a self-evident, obvious truth.

but it does suggest a few [pop]-song truisms

dictum

an authoritative saying, maxim 

the ultimate expression of Tati's dictum of "democracy" within the frame.

edict

a decree issued by a sovereign or authority

and why would his daughters view this as an [in]surmountable edict? 

Innuendo