Word: mordant
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...what came to be known as TIMEstyle. This was a fresh, sassy and sometimes impudent way of writing marked by double adjectives, alliteration, inverted sentences and frequent neologisms. Hadden was the chief inventor of TIMEstyle, and he peppered the young magazine with it. TIME called George Bernard Shaw "mocking, mordant, misanthropic," and Erich von Ludendorff "flagitious, inscrutable, unrelenting." It coined "Mussoliniland" for Italy and called drugstores "omnivenderous." When Red Grange appeared on TIME's cover, he was described as an "eel-hipped runagade" and G. K. Chesterton became "a paradoxhund...
...1930s, Muggeridge toured Russia to see what wonders the Bolshevik Revolution had wrought. When he became aware of mass starvation and terrorism, he discarded his comfortable left-wing views for life and became a determined foe of Communism. It was this experience that turned him into such a mordant critic of his fellow...
...that sequins every page in this almost too insistently scintillating biography of the Bonaparte family. David Stacton, a well-known historical novelist (Sir William, People of the Book), employs his flair for research and penchant for the trenchant style to present the Napoleonic drama as an immense and mordant Molieresque comedy in which the Bonapartes personify le bourgeois grotesquely attempting to become a gentilhomme...
...Everything. After a rip-roaring campaign, Humphrey soon learned that filling the vice-presidency could be less exhilarating than running for it. He was depressed by the President's mordant musings over his mortality. "You be good to your Vice President," Johnson said to one reporter. "He could be your President tomorrow morning." After he had been in office a few days, Humphrey received a 2 a.m. call from the Secret Service informing him that Johnson had been taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Only an hour or so later did he learn that Johnson's trouble was merely...
DARLING. This mordant satire of a play-girl's progress from obscurity to celebrity owes much to Julie Christie's dazzling presence in the leading role...