Word: mordant
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...have it. Quoting his father about how defeat shakes the soul was the right touch of poignancy. Saying he would be mending fences in Tennessee admitted how much it hurt to be rebuffed at home. Invoking the cliched "It's time for me to go" so elegiacally displayed the mordant, subtle humor of one who accepts that life is mad. Finally we glimpsed the Gore who, according to those who love him most, always existed...
...than 1 percent, and the popular impression of this week's madness as a meaningless two-ring carnival is unlikely to lend the two comabatants any additional credibility. (In one of the festivities' few moments of self-awareness, Reform elder statesman Russell Verney described the big picture thusly with mordant humor: "It's a close one, all right. John Hagelin is within one point of Pat Buchanan...
Kaufman rightly objected to being called a comedian. But he was, perhaps, a mordant self-satirist, perpetually in touch with, loving and loathing, his inner child, the lonely little Long Island boy, consoled by his obsessive interest in the trashiest manifestations of pop culture. It was his luck to come on the scene in the '70s, just as a generation that had been shaped--blighted--by the same pop materials was arriving at self-consciousness. The natural impulse of the members of that generation was to nostalgize pop culture and their own innocent response to it. On the other hand...
With her pixieish smile intact, Ernestine manages to dart out of the thicket and rejoin her husband. Now he can play tour guide--a mordant commentator who wants us to know he finds this ritual, like so many other campaign rituals, faintly ridiculous. "All right, well, this is the church," he says. "These trees are tulip trees. And as you can see, it's one of those great stone churches." He tells us how his father, a bank president who suffered from calcified arthritis of the spine, used to "sit and look out at this churchyard, and it gave...
Twenty-five years ago last Sunday night, there were thousands of people in Lafayette Park, eager witnesses to the final act of Richard Nixon's tortured presidency. Many of them were weeping, others cheering. Dan Rather was sitting on a chair, under spotlights, in mordant tones announcing the end of a political world...