Word: morbid
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...Informer. To some of his colleagues, his fear of Communism seemed a morbid preoccupation, a kind of King Charles's head. He was valued, nevertheless, not only for his firsthand knowledge of Communism but for his outstanding skill in writing and his wide cultural background. He had also become a genuinely religious man: a Quaker...
...more than incredibly obscure. It is. Here is an example. "He could be called versatile (by his critics) because he knew such a virtue to be incapable of doing well two things at once." Here is another example. "Schwartz, however, in the preface to Genesis, allies himself with the '"morbid pedestrianism" of Wordsworth and Hardy', and a reactionary romanticism we think of as typical of the genre. He has, moreover, rehearsed a certain formalism just as Coleridge corrected Wordsworth's mistaken nations about diction: besides the 'heavy accent and the slowness' he prefers, he has elsewhere explained that...
...American Years" were those in which, in the accepted version, Hawthorne's life was most shadowy-when he "lived in seclusion ... in his town of Salem, a seclusion certainly grave, if not morbid, obsessed with the Puritan sense of guilt and haunted by a family curse, writing his wonderful stories that no one knew he had written, working at the dull routine of the Custom House to provide for his family, and emerging in his early middle age ... to take part in a contemporary world he had scarcely known existed." Says Robert Cantwell: "Such a portrait, with its angular...
...soundings, said Roper, showed Dewey leading Truman by the unbeatable margin of 44% to 31%-"an almost morbid resemblance to the Roosevelt-Landon figures as of about this time in 1936." In the face of those figures, only a "political convulsion" could keep Tom Dewey out of the White House next year...
...down the coast, the wounds of the war stood out like massive scars. Civitavecchia (the port for Rome) appeared to have been "eaten and regurgitated by mastodons." Italian squalor was worsened by the morbid excitement it seemed to arouse in visiting foreigners, who, perhaps "a little stifled by ... civilization . . . when they saw a [place] that had been smashed into temporary primitiveness" felt an animal instinct "to leap into it, as though into a bath...