Word: sullenness
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Applied to mere sullen neurotics who attack others by withholding themselves, passive aggression is an item of banal psychological jargon. But down at its universal level, the term describes an unseen and mischievous jujitsu of history. It suggests the potent emotional antimatter that begins to glow like a dark crystal when people become disconnected from, and learn to mistrust or hate, the powers that control them (government, political process, corporation, parent, spouse...
...better watch itself. The passive-aggressive way of (not) doing things, perfected by clerks of the U.S. Postal Service, has spread like a drug-resistant strain of civic anger. A real insecurity and confused apprehension that something has gone basically wrong mutate by stages into free-floating sullen grievance and ballistic self-pity, a boll-weevil mentality of busy stealth, the victim/employee/citizen as secret guerrilla. Alienation...
Contemplation and self-inspection have filled the days that work has been unable to, and as a result, I have retired to a sullen life of beer and darts. While these vices are not inherently loathsome, they begin to lose their study-break effect after tens of hours. But what is a person to do? In order to regain the carefree spirit that once filled me with the ability to moderate my beer and darts, I must expel the murky residue of February, since March is now here...
Though Yeltsin may personify the post-Soviet era, all the elements of a successful politburo-style road show were in place: the mink-hatted acolytes, the handpicked entourage of veterans, the phalanx of sullen, gray-coated security agents. But as Yeltsin delivered his rambling speech, it was apparent that something had gone awry. One moment he was pledging to save Russia from a new Bolshevik revolution, the next he was suggesting that female employees of a local chocolate factory pair off with single military cadets. When he finally wound down, the lackluster applause demonstrated all too clearly that even...
...Charlottes, Whitneys and Danielles who were raped, who have bulimia, who have pierced bodies or shaved heads, who are coping with strict religious families or are felled by their parents' bitter divorce. There's a girl here for everyone: either the girl the reader once was or the sullen one now lolling about the reader's house listening to Hole. "The book put a name and a face on something I was already sensing," says Annette Davis, a San Jose, California, mother of two, who has given copies of the book to her children's teachers. "It wasn't just...