Word: mordantly
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...that mortals can legitimately come to a glimpse of what lies on the other side. Thomas A. Edison said as he died in 1931, "It's very beautiful over there." (It is also possible, however, that he was referring to the view outside his window.) Voltaire had a mordant premonition. The lamp next to his deathbed flared momentarily, and his last words were "What? The flames already...
...novel-and very good. Not for him the extravagant mythmaking of his contemporary Salman Rushdie or the chilly experiments of Ian McEwan. Stylistically, Wilson is headed straight into the past, when a novelist told a suspenseful story and commanded his characters' souls. He can be flippant and overly mordant, but his lively wit and fine sense of morals and manners mark him, at 33, as a formidable novelist already...
...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...