Felix Unger's Ghost and the Elegy of Eloquence.
Tony Randall and the Grammar of Grace. There was something almost architectural about the way Tony Randall spoke. Each sentence felt meticulously engineered, a miniature edifice of cadence and clarity. He never uttered words; he constructed them, syllable by syllable, as if language itself were a form of moral carpentry. In an age so enamored with spontaneity, his precision seemed almost subversive, a quiet defiance against the slovenliness of modern expression. Randall did not perform language; he consecrated it. His voice, urbane, resonant, faintly melancholic, carried the conviction that speech was a civilizational artifact, one too sacred to be squandered. To him, vocabulary wasn’t a trophy of intellect but the apparatus of thought. Every word had lineage, nuance, and temperature. To misuse it was not merely inelegant; it was profane. Watching him on screen, particularly as Felix Unger in The Odd Couple, you felt that rare synthesis of comedy and conscience. Beneath the comic...