At the full flowering of the celebrity age, few accessories rival the chandelier earring for its power to amplify star wattage.

[…] bleaching, which nicely captures the partial effacement of a morpheme's semantic features, the stripping away of some of its precise content so it can be used in an abstracter, grammatical-hardware-like way.

There were clerks innumerable, with underelerks beneath them and overclerks above.

The heightened worlds of darkly comedic satire and soapy high-school romance make it easy enough to roll with unrealistic casting choices—and that goes for stage musicals, too, where some level of artifice is built into the format.