Word: sardonicism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
It was funny in a way, particularly since the white Mississippian will nod his head zealously through about two-thirds of the spiel, until he gets the point. Slack-jawed indignation ensues. I am afraid, though, that you have ruined my sardonic joke. I got half way through your cover...
Cummings asks his audience to cast off cherished preconception so that they can feel the world with his own sardonic intellect and agile senses. "Whenever a stuffed platitude hits you in the exaggerated emphalos," Cummings counsels, "respond with a three-fisted aphorism to the precise casazza." If that advice does...
MAHLER: SONGS FROM DBS KNABEN WUNDERHORN (Vanguard). In the 1890s, Mahler was so drawn to the German folk poems in the old anthology called The Youth's Magic Horn that he not only turned them into songs but turned the songs into symphonies. The texts are often grim or...
That prominent lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov is a busy but exceedingly thrifty man. During the past decade, in between chasing butterflies, translating Pushkin (TIME, July 31), and writing his brilliant, cross-grained fiction, he has been bringing to market carefully supervised English translations of his own early novels, which he wrote...
Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. Over the rim of a hill near Abalone, Ariz., rides a bearded Chinese thaumaturge, 7,321 years old. He sits astride a small yellow mule, a goldfish bowl mounted on his saddle. To light his pipe, he conjures up a flame on the end of...