Word: jocular
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Some wonder whether coziness with powerful people, combined with a jocular streak and a touch of intellectual arrogance, led Ibrahim into trouble, across so-called red lines set by Egypt's security establishment. Before his arrest, he liked to jet around to global conferences and sound off in the Western and Arab press. A friend recalls once recoiling when Mubarak arrived late for a meeting and Ibrahim demanded to know why he had kept them waiting. His first defense lawyer quit after Ibrahim detailed his detention in a public lecture dubbed, "How I Spent My Summer Vacation." "He has guts...
...somehow a little bit farther off than the end of time. It’s dark and closed and I’m safe from what’s out there but not from what’s in here—the impending cataclysm, the imploding immenseness, the jocular enormity.” Luminous perfect phrases like “jocular enormity” stud the book like jewels (Johnson on the first atomic bomb test: “the orange fireball levitating amid its electric-blue halo”). The inventiveness, the eye for detail, and the understated...
...universe that every era has its cute British rock band and its brooding British rock band. The early '60s had the cuddly Beatles and the roguish Rolling Stones; the '70s and '80s had the romantic Police and the revolutionary Clash; the '90s had jocular Oasis and snide Blur. Since Radiohead, the band infamously given to brooding, has emerged as the most prominent British rock export of the early '00s, the rise of a cute alternative has seemed almost inevitable...
...granddaughter's portrait-by-accumulation (a sort of fractured Polaroid, slowly developing) interweaves Joe Kennedy's documents with family letters, diaries and other material that supplies context and depth and a sort of jocular devotion that reflects handsomely upon the old man. From Antibes, 21-year-old Teddy cables: "Happy Father's Day having barrels of fun send money for more barrels Love Ted." From his honeymoon in Acapulco in September 1953, Jack wires: "At last I know true meaning of rapture Jackie is enshrined forever in my heart thanks Mom and Dad for making me worthy of her your...
...Funny that the Adams family (President John Adams and his son President John Quincy Adams, who was the grandfather of Henry) keeps popping up. George Bush the Elder, in a jocular dynastic mood, has taken to calling his son "Quincy," and over the weekend, the New York Times published a pre-inaugural ranch interview with W. in which the President-elect mentioned he was reading a biography of John Quincy Adams: "If [my father]'s going to refer to me as Quincy, I might as well find out what the fellow was all about...