Word: mordant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There was also no mistaking the feverish, often mordant speculation about what Brown would do to shake up the New Yorker. When Brown announced her departure to a devoted Vanity Fair staff, she dissolved in tears; but as she prepared to travel the three blocks to the New Yorker offices to meet her new editing cadre, she fretted privately, "They're going to hate me." She did what she could to reassure them, pledging that "the New Yorker will not be Vanity Fair...
...dream life of the '30s, remote from the privations of the Depression. But as he and his rich friends cruised the beauty spots of the world, he was listening to the rhythms of their speech and of the bands they danced to, transforming their fads and crazes into often mordant social comment. And into 500 or so of the best American songs ever written -- ballads, laments, sophisticated melodies, impudent scatter, chatter, smatter songs. The miracle of this four-CD set is that it makes a rich sampling of those songs sound so fresh and persuades the listener to hear...
...what are these shows really attacking -- the family, or simply TV's sentimentalized portrayal of it? For all the Bundys' biting sarcasm and Roseanne's mordant wisecracks, the one thing that is never questioned is the sanctity of the family. Roseanne's rebellious kids have something most of their real-life counterparts do not: two wise, empathetic, firmly in-control parents. Even the crass Bundys -- TV's broadest caricature of a "bad" family -- have a stubborn, low-down sense of togetherness...
...kill from behind a screen of negligent-looking spontaneity. His energy was abrasive, and where it touched the world, it threw off hot, stinging little sparks like an emery wheel. When his poster Queen of Joy, 1892 -- advertising a now forgotten novel by Victor Joze -- with its mordant image of the courtesan kissing the fleshy nose of a fat banker, went up on the walls of Paris, a pair of stockbroker's clerks were sent out to tear down every one they could find...
...work. The central male, informed that someone loves him, replies that no such thing exists. His best friend's mantra: "Everybody lies." To underscore the nihilism, playwright Brad Fraser, 32, interweaves teen folklore of erotic mayhem, references to AIDS and a gradual unveiling of a serial killer -- all with mordant humor (a man going to a pickup bar shouts to his female roommate, "I have a blind date with destiny!"). A hit in Fraser's native Edmonton, Alta., and in Chicago, Human Remains is not only stylistically apt and journalistically observant about its rock-and-anomie world but also deeply...