mordantly


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mor·dant

 (môr′dnt)
adj.
1.
a. Bitingly sarcastic: mordant satire.
b. Incisive and trenchant: an inquisitor's mordant questioning.
2. Bitingly painful.
3. Serving to fix colors in dyeing.
n.
1. A reagent, such as tannic acid, that fixes dyes to cells, tissues, or textiles or other materials.
2. A corrosive substance, such as an acid, used in etching.
tr.v. mor·dant·ed, mor·dant·ing, mor·dants
To treat with a mordant.

[French, from Old French, present participle of mordre, to bite, from Vulgar Latin *mordere, from Latin mordēre; see mer- in Indo-European roots.]

mor′dan·cy n.
mor′dant·ly adv.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive ?
Razor-sharp, mordantly cynical, surprisingly goofy.
It concludes mordantly, and in general terms, with the observation that 'a slide from greatness to decadence is apparent within a single generation'.
It's a circle of life as vicious trap, grimly realized and mordantly funny.
Rather than allowing the film to get overdramatized, the insightful director chooses to keep things on an even keel with the mordantly funny, bleak black laughs he intersperses with the production's dramatic sequences.
She talks mordantly about "the power from Pulp ," and reminds me that it's in the Library of Congress, part of the American narrative.
Set in the near future, The Afterlives is a mordantly funny and deeply human look at one man's quest to find out what happens after we die.
There are also mordantly funny observations about the Canadian music scene and Canada itself, like the raucous Steerpunchers mega-bar in Calgary, soulless Ontario blues players, or images of strip-club patrons watching the show and the hockey game on TV with equally drunken interest.
"I love the [Rocky and] Bullwinkle show because it's so mordantly witty.
He called the book a work of"nonsensical history and execrable citizenship," which, he added mordantly,"should come with a warning: 'Caution you are about to enter a no-facts zone.'" An affronted O'Reilly summoned Will, a Fox News contributor at the time, for an on-air excoriation."You are not telling the truth!" he yelled."You are actively misleading the American people!
One picture has a mordantly bathetic caption--'corpse with a receding hairline and a toe tag'.
Spare, mordantly funny, and bearing whiffs of both mystery and mischief, they ask, often obliquely: How should a nation remember a traumatic past, and how should it redress the ongoing trauma?
"Nothing's ever mine, not to keep," the newly widowed Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy mordantly observes midway through "Jackie" Pablo Larrain's relentlessly close-up take on history's most iconic first lady.