jocosity

• “He was an odd mixture of awkwardness and complacency, a desire to be courteous struggling with a desire to show his independence; he had no ease of manner, no bonhomie, but a gruff and ugly kind of jocosity, which I am sure was not really natural to him, but was his protest against the possibility of my considering him to be shy.”

  The Silent Isle

• “Lewis Carroll's best parodies are pure poetry, but he was also capable of routine Victorian jocosity of producing a parody of Swinburne entitled (with a nod towards Atalanta in Calydon) 'Atalanta in Camden Town'.”

  The Wall Street Journal: 'The Oxford Book of Parodies'

• “It had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever, and I more than once confessed publicly that it was only a jocosity … Scarcely a month goes by that I do not find the substance of it reprinted, not as foolishness but as fact, and not only in newspapers but in official documents and other works of the highest pretensions.”

  August « 2008 « Isegoria

• “Sununu himself was passing the whole thing off with heavy jocosity.”

  Newsweek: The 'Air Sununu' Flap

• “His features were not naturally intended to wear a smiling aspect, but he was in general rather given to professional jocosity.”

  Oliver Twist

• “In this letter there is a tone of jocosity with reference to the victim, which filled me with horror.”

  The Commission in Lunacy

• “I mean not the sad jocosity of P.O.M.216 passages or the mere callender of slaughter.”

  Simon & Schuster: A Life in Letters

• “Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant or apparent.”

  December 7th, 2005

• “‘There is an elaborate jocosity about him, a determined eternity of most industrious fun, which gives us the idea of a boy who is being rewarded for having duly learnt by rote his daily lesson out of Joe Miller.’”

  The Three Clerks

• “And the Saturday would have had a column of sneering jocosity on the irrepressibly sanguine temperament of authors.”

  New Grub Street

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