excruciations

Every episode here is a subtle gem, getting way too close for comfort on the excruciations of political correctness, our modern failure to organise a cup of tea without a flowchart and the impossibility of getting athletes to say anything interesting, ever.

Rewind TV: The Hour; The Apprentice; Show Me the Funny; Imagine; Richard Hammond's Journey to the Centre of the Planet; Twenty Twelve – review 2011

He has caught some flak for the broadness of some of his films, but his performances are invariably finer than they look: his cat-milking soliloquy at the dinner table in Meet The Parents is a filigree bit of self-disembowelment, while some of the lesser shades of mortification and dread essayed by Stiller align him more closely with the subtle excruciations ofBritish comedy.

Ben Stiller: 'I never talk to my shrink about comedy' Tom Shone 2010

But with Goblin it can become a flaming passion, with him trying to work everybody up to go out and treat a few tax people to grotesque excruciations and deaths.

Shadow Games Cook, Glen 1989

I had to explain to several clients that this was the only day of the year on which they would get meat, and went along assuring one after another that there would be no excruciations - the feast day itself and the day after are exempt, and even when a sentence demands torment on those days, it is postponed.

The Shadow of the Torturer Wolfe, Gene 1980

Lesser places have no more than a carnifex, who takes life and performs such excruciations as the judicators there decree.

The Shadow of the Torturer Wolfe, Gene 1980

If the guild had particular excruciations reserved for specific individuals, I knew nothing of it; but I endeavored to look wise and said, "We'll think of something."

The Shadow of the Torturer Wolfe, Gene 1980

But he handles his body like an adolescent suffering excruciations of self-consciousness with every move.

The Genius Mailer, Norman 1972

He has solemnly impressed them with the mysterious sacredness of the Ganges, and its manifold virtues of a supernatural order; to swear falsely by its waters, he says, is a crime for which Indra the Dreadful has provided an eternity of excruciations, -- except the false oath be taken in the interest of a Brahmin, in which case the perjurer may confidently expect a posthumous good time.

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 08, June 1858 Various

Robert Hall, suffering excruciations, so that often in his pulpit while preaching he would stop and lie down on a sofa, then getting up again to preach about heaven until the glories of the celestial city dropped on the multitude, doing more work, perhaps, than almost any well man in his day.

New Tabernacle Sermons 1867

The excruciations of famine were better than the agonies which this abhorred meal had produced.

Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker Charles Brockden Brown 1790