Oration

His great oration was like pearls before swine.

This 21st of May of 2025 is a sunny, yet cloudy, day. I went walking in the morning to Tim Hortons café to enjoy an Iced Coffee with oat milk. The other day, I tried their pink-looking Pineapple Dragon Fruit Frozen Quencher. 'Twas more like icy candy for me! Later in the morning today, I went walking to the Roman Catholic church on St. Albans Road. On the way, I gazed at the big purple-bloom Empress Tree, near Bowcock Road. The blooms are starting to fade. In the big worship hall was a small class of little boys and girls, dressed in uniform, students practicing bowing at the altar and oration at the microphone. They looked like mostly Filipino kids, this time. It reminded of my private school days at La Salle Green Hills in the Philippines. Even then, our liturgical language was also English, as here on Lulu Island. It was despite that our household and street language was Tagalog. In the 1960s, the Church globally changed the liturgical language from Latin to the vernacular language. I remember my Thai Buddhist Temple in Vancouver—Wat Yanviriya. The wonderful liturgical language was Pali. It was the language that made the temple stay magical! We learned meditation, which is what I do in the church on St. Albans Road. I try to go when the big worship hall is mostly empty. At home, I try to learn more Esperanto vocabulary.

a funeral oration; an impassioned oration; to make / deliver / pronounce an oration

[…] there is ſuch confuſion in my powers, / As after ſome Oration fairely ſpoke / By a beloued Prince, there doth appeare / Among the buzzing pleaſed multitude.

And vpon a ſet day Herod arayed in royall apparell, ſate vpon his throne, and made an Oration vnto them.

1752, Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 207, 10 March, 1752, in Volume 6, London: J. Payne and J. Bouquet, 1752, p. 279, The masters of rhetorick direct, that the most forcible arguments be produced in the latter part of an oration, lest they should be effaced or perplexed by supervenient images.

[…] when the provinces again displayed their old flags (proscribed in Guzman Bento’s time) there was another of those great orations, when Don José greeted these old emblems of the war of Independence, brought out again in the name of new Ideals.

My Landlord was likewiſe beginning his Oration to Jones, but was preſently interrupted by that generous Youth, who ſhook him heartily by the Hand; and aſſured him of entire Forgiveneſs […]

Sally bustled off to set on the kettle for tea, and felt half ashamed, in the quiet of the kitchen, to think of the oration she had made in the parlour.

The supper things cleared away, Gerald resumed his oration, but with little satisfaction to himself and none at all to his audience.