half-sarcastic

• “They look at her and go, "Hey, she's just like me - she's heavily in debt and a black guy's trying to steal her job." (sadly, that's only half-sarcastic)”

  Oregon Exit Polls: Obama Handily Beat Hillary Among Whites, No-College, Less-Than-$50,000 Voters

• “Lately he has been downright snippy at moments, as in his half-sarcastic quip that Hillary was "likable enough.”

  John Neffinger: Hillary's Moment

• “That's only half-sarcastic, by the way, but I'm still astounded at some of the great stuff that gets ignored.”

  Thoughts on the Eisner Nominations | Comics Should Be Good! @ Comic Book Resources

• “The question's only half-sarcastic; you can only half discuss it without going there or relying on platitudes.”

  November 2006

• “Thee in that delicate half-sarcastic tracery of the nostril I detected the intellectual defiance which had politically isolated Silas Ruthyn and opposed him to the landed oligarchy of his county, whose retaliation had been a hideous slander.”

  Uncle Silas

• “She gave a little unbidden laugh, half-sarcastic, part disbelief.”

  Bottled Spider

• “I feel humiliated,' I say, half-sarcastic, but he's too dumb to catch on.”

  The Rules of Attraction

• “He spoke in his old half-sarcastic, half-cynical way, but a feeble, gasping voice, that made an effect of contrast, as of the tragic face espied behind the grinning mask.”

  My Little Lady

• “She figured him sternly weighing instances of her levity in this masculine court of inquiry into feminine morality and gruffly dismissing both her and her family with some half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed her doom, as far as he was concerned, for ever.”

  Night and Day

• “He might have been sitting for his portrait, which would have represented a rather striking young man of five-and-twenty, with a square forehead, short dark-brown hair, standing erect, with a slight wave at the end, like a thick crop of corn, and a half-ardent, half-sarcastic glance from under his well-marked horizontal eyebrows.”

  I. A Duet in Paradise. Book VI—The Great Temptation

Show 10 more examples...