Should you contemplate purchasing a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, a "mega-genius" according to Aaron (in private), he will tell you beforehand that García Márquez "is so rococo and torporific you'll need an insulin shot every twenty pages." John Nichols, On Top of Spoon Mountain, 2012

... such versions respond to perfectly legitimate concerns about what is comprehensible to a child, who might well feel 'squashed by the words and strangled by the sentence' ... when faced by some of Kingsley's more rococo passages ... Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, "Introduction," The Water-Babies (1863) by Charles Kingsley, 2013

The interior of the tiny temple was dim, and wisps of incense smoke made graceful volutes in the air. John Maddox Roberts, SPQR IX: The Princess and the Pirates, 2005

My, how light this Alonso de Avila was, forced to walk on mere earth only because of the richness and gravity of his damask and jaguar-skin suits, his gold chains, and his tawny mantle decorate with a reliquary--all of it lightened, let me assure you, by the feathers in his cap and the volutes of his mustache, the wings of his face. Carlos Fuentes, The Orange Tree, translated by Alfred Mac Adam, 1994

He counted heavily on his ability to dissemble, knowing that every decent lawyer had at least several drops of dissimulation in his blood. Elizabeth George, Missing Joseph, 1993

I didn't know how to dissemble, I quite openly acknowledged the mistakes I made, and didn't try hard to hide them. Johann Michael von Loën, The Honest Man at Court, 1748, translated by John R. Russell, 1997

The 1954 season for predicting the Congressional elections is now in full swing and the political dopesters will be hard at it from now until Nov. 2, when the voters will select more than one-third of the Senators and all of the Congressmen who will sit in the Eighty-fourth Congress. Ruth Silva, "A Look Into a Crystal Election Ball," New York Times, October 10, 1954

We make no prediction, not being either a dopester or an expert. Ernest C. Hastings, "Stock the Goods That Women Want," Dry Goods Economist, October 21, 1922

That bewhiskered saying that "pride goeth before a fall" is true only in the case of ignorant people, says The International Lifeman. , "Stick Up Your Chin," The Spectator: Life Insurance Supplement, January 7, 1915

Good things come in small packages. ... This wrinkled and bewhiskered expression haunts our editorial vision when we pause to contemplate the career of a life, progressive citizen of the gopher state, a man small in stature but big in brain. , "Sidelights on Men in the Trade," Domestice Engineering, October 3, 1914

It is so pleasant to receive a fillip of excitement when suffering from the dull routine of everyday life! Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, 1857

His ordinary government allowance of spirits, one gill per diem, is not enough to give a sufficient fillip to his listless senses ... Herman Melville, White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War, 1850

"Grumphie smells the weather, / An' grumphie sees the wun'; / He kens when clouds will gather, / An' smoor the blinikin' sun." This extravagant tribute to the pig as a weather prophet is typical of a large number of proverbs, though, perhaps no other animal has been credited with actually seeing the wind. W. J. Humphreys, "Some Weather Proverbs and Their Justification," The Popular Science Monthly, January 1911

If ye're proud to be a grumphie clap yer trotters! Alastair D. McIver, Glasgow Fairytale, 2010