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Encomium

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(pronounced en-koh-mee-um)  noun

Definition

1. glowing and enthusiastic praise. 2. a formal expression of high praise (in speech or in writing) for a person or thing.

Main Example

• Last month (Monday, June 12), President Trump held his first full cabinet meeting--a meeting so strange that videos of its opening made the evening news. The session began with each member of the cabinet going around the room uttering glowing words of praise for the nation’s 45th president and expressing utmost gratitude for the privilege of serving under him. And seemingly, each person was trying to outdo everyone else in how impassioned he or she came across. Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s encomium took the cake: “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing you’ve given us to serve your agenda....”

Workplace Examples

• Hats off to our VP for the way she described Seth during last night’s award ceremony, using phrases like “the very definition of integrity,” and “his uncompromising adherence to our mission statement” . . . I have never heard a more powerfully delivered encomium.
• By all means, Mary Lynn’s achievement is extraordinary! I just hope that encomium from the CEO doesn’t go to her head.

Other Examples

• a relatively recent biopic that is absolutely worthy of all the encomiums it has gotten from movie critics: “Hacksaw Ridge,” a 2016 “Best Picture” Oscar nominee and the true story of Pfc. Desmond Doss who, despite his refusal to carry a firearm on religious grounds, went on to win the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroic deeds during the Battle of Okinawa
• the endless encomiums that were heaped on Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton at last year’s Republican and Democratic National Conventions respectively
• on the day he resigned as head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev being lavished with encomiums by Western leaders, with some even calling him “the century’s most towering figure”
• one of the encomiums that the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan received from nonpartisan sources while serving in the U.S. Senate: “The greatest thinker among politicians since Abraham Lincoln, and the greatest politician among thinkers since Thomas Jefferson.”

© 2018 V.J. Singal
No part of this may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author.

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