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Covering the meeting, The Times described the Chinese with the pejorative “Celestials,” as figures of “sphinxlike” demeanor.

Cryptics, by comparison, age gracefully: their sphinxlike wordplay has a long shelf life.

This sphinxlike silence is, in turn, conducive to a second, more intangible function: to serve as a conduit for mass emotion, a projection screen for national yearning or catharsis.

A memoir, Piepenbring writes in his introduction, might have enhanced the singer’s sphinxlike persona.

Behind his sphinxlike features, I could sense, there was an air of skepticism.