Word: condign
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...Broder claims he is not nostalgic for the giant Arkansas watermelon; for his sticky insincerities; the wet, lip-biting flow of his poignancies. But still Broder senses some "odd silence at the center of the city," as if a condign presidential music were missing, as if we were entitled to a fireside chat and were not hearing...
...Gore greeted the GOP's Manchurian ploy with all condign solemnity. He gravely pronounced himself "very disappointed" in George W. Bush. I suppose it would have been too much to expect Gore to greet the rat story with the snorting hilarity it deserved...
Would he criticize an erring colleague? "I shall," Dirksen would promise, in a voice like the finest whiskey aged in fog, "invoke upon him every condign imprecation." Dirksen was especially toothsome when praising the fig newton, manufactured in Illinois. "A man who has not sunk a molar into a fig newton," Dirksen would announce, his gray-golden ringlets vibrating with emotion, "has let much of life pass...
That part of the male brain that is not fastidious about the U.S. Constitution and its phrase about "cruel and unusual punishment" produces this (typically male, violent) solution: a perfect retribution for the rapist, a condign mutilation. Let one-third of his instrument of crime be removed surgically. If he rapes again, let one-third of what remains be removed. This is a sort of pre-emptive judicial Bobbitt-lopping. Let the justice system and its surgeons play Zeno's Paradox on the rapist's johnson and see how many offenses he is equipped for. (Zeno's Paradox, of course...
...years, he developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr. Would he criticize an erring colleague? someone would ask. "I shall invoke upon him every condign imprecation," Dirksen would intone, with a quiver of his basset's jowls and the gold-gray ringlets of his hair...