infelicity

A minor infelicity is the distractingly busy set by David Gallo.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 26, 2026

For a more complete and very funny deconstruction of its infelicity, read Jonathan Last’s riff in The Bulwark.

From New York Times ● Jul. 25, 2020

This type of verbal infelicity underscores the limitations of automatic, computerized word and spelling-check mechanisms, whereby a word or words can slip through undetected, regardless of the context of usage, however inapposite.

From Washington Post ● Mar. 15, 2019

Yet the sheer variety of interactions makes up for the occasional infelicity.

From Slate ● Oct. 26, 2017

Nevertheless, on the contrary, she was always apologetic where Mary was concerned, and had always sought to conceal her shortcomings and domestic infelicity.

From The Seven Secrets by William Le Queux

The characters, with their insistence on self-determination, feel too modern, and there are a few infelicities, like the idea that “The Communist Manifesto,” first translated into English toward the end of 1850, would circulate onboard.

From New York Times ● May 22, 2022

Then there’s the error-prone syntax — infelicities in editing and writing that add up quickly.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 10, 2022

And so, as I write, a little tab with a G on it is hovering to the side, ready to flag my infelicities of expression.

From Slate ● Feb. 8, 2022

Everything about me is out of proportion — including my peanut-sized head — so I face the choice of billowing, dowdy garments or tighter clothes that sometimes cruelly expose my physical infelicities.

From Salon ● Jan. 11, 2020

In those first weeks, Bolles’s topic varied each day, depending on factors as unpredictable as the Seattle weather or what particular infelicities of technique he had noticed in the previous practice.

From "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics" by Daniel James Brown