Word: mordantly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...seeming a hero (before his election in 1960, he listened intently to recordings of Winston Churchill's speeches, picking up the grand rhythms of the language), he knew the limitations of everything, including himself. His instruments were sensitive to the bogus. He might even have had some mordant crack to make about that Eternal Flame...
...eyes, cartoony ears and fragmentary evocations of Felix the Cat. But at the same time, Alexander's torrent of images corresponds to a real need, which, on the whole, his formal system can handle. But when his indignation is at full blast-as in The Art King, a mordant quotation from Bosch, showing a startled windbag of a culture hero being devoured, crown and all, by a leopard-he is plainly an original, though not necessarily a pleasant...
DIED. Erving Goffman, 60, unorthodox sociologist whose provocative books (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Forms of Talk) developed his somewhat mordant theories of contemporary ritual, based upon the overlooked small print of daily life (gossip, gestures, even grunts), in such settings as mental asylums and advertising columns; of cancer; in Philadelphia...
...defied good sense and good taste, fiction has been a major beneficiary. Yale-educated Michael Thomas, who at 46 has had successful careers in both milieus (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lehman Brothers), has distilled from the darker lunacies of these worlds a novel of crackling humor and mordant observation. Its bigger-than-Barron 's protagonist is Oilman Buford ("Bubber") Gudge IV, who has been content to nurse his multibillion-dollar fortune in the Texas Panhandle until lust and vengeance propel him forth like a plague of pissants...
...like trying to till a field with knitting needles. Cyril Connolly would not have made his own list. He wrote his line about writers we might miss in a minor book called The Unquiet Grave (1944). He died in 1974. But open the book now, in 1982, and his mordant, elegant light pours out of the volume, alive, into the eye, the waiting, conscious mind...