piquancy

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Definitions (5)

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  1. Piquant quality. Agreeable pungency or sharpness, as of flavor or taste. Pleasing cleverness or raciness, as of manner, style, etc. A mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking. George Eliot, Mill on the Floss, vii. 4. “How disturbed?” inquired Holgrave. “By things without, or by thoughts within?” “I cannot see his thoughts! How should I?” replied Phœbe, with simple piquancy. Hawthorne, Seven Gables, xii. Our American life is dreadfully barren of those elements of the social picturesque which give piquancy to anecdote. Lowell, Study Windows, p. 91.
  2. Keenness; sharpness; tartness; severity, as of remark or utterance. Commonly also satyrical taunts do owe their seeming piquancy, not to the speaker or his words, but to the subject and the hearers. Barrow, Sermons, I. xiv.

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Examples

  • As for the general mass, their piquancy is not so great as to superinduce in the reader of to-day a dangerously violent cachinnation. —  The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller
  • He measured its value by its piquancy, by its adaptability to epigrammatic rhymes. —  The Life of Cesare Borgia
  • The following had an indescribable piquancy, which arose from the Scotticism of the terms and the manners. —  Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character
  • There would — they, no doubt, thought — be an undeniable piquancy, a distinct flavour of semi-scandalous incongruity in listening to the Word of Life from the lips of this loose-tongued droll; and the more staid and serious the sermon, the more effective the contrast. —  Sterne
  • "nothing but bravura and figuration!" — did not see, but what must be patent to every candid and unprejudiced observer, are the originality, piquancy, and grace of these fioriture, roulades, which, indeed, are unlike anything that was ever heard or seen before Chopin's time. —  Frederic Chopin as a Man and Musician
 

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