But the stirring sentiments were not just felicitous phrases, they were a political statement.

As a writer Hitchens is not, in a felicitous phrase he applies to Orwell, "forever taking his own temperature."

In a felicitous phrase, the king summed up his efforts at reform as "politic drifts and amiable persuasions".

His felicitous phrases shine like polished onion domes amid concrete-block high-rises.

Suppose the borrowings of words and felicitous phrases come to a total of 175 in a single book?

But paleontologists then discovered "deep time," in John McPhee's felicitous phrase.

That is a felicitous phrase with one serious flaw: at least at 5 Ninth, his food manages to dazzle only half of the time.

Meter, rhyme, felicitous phrases and what not mask the underlying weakness or banality.

There is, of course, a difference between a memorable, felicitous phrase and mere sloganeering.