apery

• “No theater could hold out against the laughter of apery at this sight.”

  Simon & Schuster: The Metamorphosis, in The Penal Colony,and Other Stories

• “The petals were so dry and apery that they crumbled at the first touch.”

  The Seventh Scroll

• “Schoppe, the satiric chorus of Jean Paul's romance of Titan, makes his appearance at a certain masked ball, carrying in front of him a glass case, in which the ball is remasked, repeated, and again reflected in a mirror behind, by a set of puppets, ludicrously aping the apery of the courtiers, whose whole life and outward manifestation was but a body-mask mechanically moved with the semblance of real life and action.”

  A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

• “There was nothing original as yet discoverable in him; nothing to deliver him from the poor imitative apery in which he imagined himself a poet.”

  Sir Gibbie

• “I saw there many women, dressed without regard to the season or the demands of the place, in apery, or, as it looked, in mockery, of European fashions.”

  Woman in the Ninteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties, of Woman.

• “It pleased me far better, than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery.”

  Biographia Literaria

• “Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences.”

  Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher

• “Hence the comic matter chosen in the first instance is a ridiculous imitation or apery of this constant striving after logical precision, and subtle opposition of thoughts, together with a making the most of every conception or image, by expressing it under the least expected property belonging to it, and this, again, rendered specially absurd by being applied to the most current subjects and occurrences.”

  Literary Remains, Volume 2

• “Self Preserved …' 's loose, jam-based riff colossi stand in stark relief to everyone else's doo-wop apery or sterile poptronica.”

  NME Features

• “It was the 1950s, in other words-that time of culture's parody and simulacrum and apery.”

  FIRST THINGS: On the Square

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