lachrymosity

• “Having listened this morning to John Tusa present a programme on Radio 4 recalling the brutal Russian extirpation of the Prague Spring in August 1968, I found myself moved to an outbreak of lachrymosity - just as I was forty years ago at the moment of Czechoslovakia's prostration - at the anguish of her people and their dignity in grave adversity.”

  Archive 2008-08-17

• “As the American Primary/Caucus season cranks into a frenzy of campaigning, claim, counter-claim, low blow and moments of pathos (or, in the case of hard-nosed, hard-faced Hillary Clinton, a carefully contrived moment of pseudo-lachrymosity), take heed of the rude good health of American democracy.”

  American Democracy or European Oligarchy?

• “It was the young women who were supposed to have been optimistic and breezy about the future, the old ones who were meant to feel pessimistic, but here was Steinem, buoyant and dry-eyed in the face of a youthful lachrymosity.”

  Simon & Schuster: Big Girls Don’t Cry

• “The 1969 cutoff is given to avoid including Springsteen with the likes of "I Want My Baby Back" (wherein the obsessed survivor sings the last chorus from inside his dead lover's coffin, having dug her up and climbed in ... since I haven't heard it for years, I'm not sure that this was meant to involve teens, though it's definitely a full-strength parody of morbid pop lachrymosity).”

  Teen Tragedy Song List

• “If such a metaphor had been tried in Global Woman, I would have dinged the writer for lachrymosity — but yes, to get to yon Isle of White, we pass taquerias, a check-cashing joint, a group of weary-looking Hispanic women standing at the bus stop.”

  Kiddie Class Struggle

• “They would have despised a life set wholly in a minor key, and summoned it to keep within the proper bounds of lachrymosity.”

  The Varieties of Religious Experience

• “Observation without sentiment usually leads to humor or satire; sentiment without observation to rhetoric and long-drawn lachrymosity.”

  George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy

• “Response to commentary on AC/GB lachrymosity online ...”

  Army Rumour Service

• “Glenn Beck is Father Coughlin on -- well, maybe not steroids but some other lachrymosity potion.”

  TPMCafe

• “Let us rub off such incrustations, so far as they are due to the corrosion of Pope’s wit or the deposit of mid-Victorian lachrymosity, and see what, for us in our time, remains.”

  The Common Reader

Show 10 more examples...