Word: mordant
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...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...
...reference is apt. Like Thoreau, Iyer combines an acute sense of place with a mordant irony. The revealing detail is his specialty: he recalls "an old monk brush, brush, brushing a pathway clean . . . a sitting Buddha imparting a peace so strong it felt like wisdom . . . Yet one could never forget the world entirely. Floating up from below came the sound, plangent and forlorn, of a garbage collector's truck playing its melancholy song...
...future and a fading sense of national identity? An identity crisis -- in France? It sounds as unlikely as the notion of Cyrano de Bergerac fumbling his sword or groping for the mot juste. In his 1983 book The Europeans, the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini, a seasoned and mordant observer of the Continental scene, cites Edmond Rostand's fictional Cyrano as the quintessence of French character, at least as outsiders exaggerate it: the boastful, cocksure Gascon whose fellow provincials are defined in Rostand's play as "free fighters, free lovers, free spenders, defenders of old homes, old names and old splendors...
LIFE DURING WARTIME. Keith Reddin's mordant comedy at California's Berkeley Rep depicts war outside the front door: burglars, muggers and other paranoia inducers who make homeowners yearn for security, and alarm salesmen who prey on their fears...