> Back in the very best period of English prose they
> had a concept they called 'copia', which might
> be translated as 'copiousness' or 'abundance' or
> even 'luxuriance'. Pithy prose is a bourgeois
> shibboleth.
Agreed. Many see Swift as one of the great English prose masters, which he was -- and his very best prose, in Tale of a Tub, has the copia of Elizabethan prose.
_Copia_ could also be glossed if not translated as "fullness" I think.
Carrol