Word: noxiousness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...support ethnic nationalism in places like East Timor, but in Serbia that same emotion turned murderous. Religious fundamentalism is fine for, say, Mormons, but when it metastasizes into terrorism, it is noxious. Certainty is fine when the right people are certain, but things get dicey when, as Yeats wrote, "the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity...
...Iraq's population is either Shiite Muslim or Kurdish had raised concerns that bringing down the regime could presage a breakup of the country that would destabilize the region. But for the hawks, September 11 and the subsequent anthrax terror highlighted the danger of leaving a regime as noxious as Saddam's intact, and they have been pressing hard for the U.S. to tackle Iraq once Afghanistan is over...
...responsible for the death of thousands of people, but from the view of the Islamic streets, he's an Islamic Robin Hood who's standing up to the U.S. and fighting for traditional Muslim values. Terrorists are in the PR and propaganda business. Their product is a kind of noxious publicity - they are about the sizzle not the steak. And they've been succeeding. Around the Third World, bin Laden t-shirts and posters are doing a brisk business. You don't see many people wearing USA t-shirts; they're more likely to be burning them. Bin Laden...
...best, however, not to look down. The jade-green water that laps the shores is slimy to the touch, glinting with an oily iridescence and dotted with tourist flotsam and jetsam of which carrier bags and lumps of polystyrene are among the least noxious. The fisherfolk who invite visitors aboard their sampan settlements with offers of rice wine or bamboo bongs also sell coral and shells stolen from the few reefs that remain. And the grenades and dynamite sticks that you see stored in the cabins below give a blunt indication of the level of respect the fishermen...
...Hence the need to bring depression, and its sufferers, out of the shadows. Not that there's any shortage of material on the subject. Alongside some noxious self-help manuals, there have been remarkable personal accounts - William Styron's Darkness Visible, A. Alvarez's A Savage God - and excellent academic texts like Kay Redfield Jamison's Night Falls Fast. But Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression (Chatto & Windus; 560 pages) is poised to become the book for a generation that, more than any other, has this "living death" at its core...