asperity

When the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno doubted the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz, Celan replied with the asperity of one who knew where barbarism had lodged.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 5, 2026

On a re-read, Orwell’s narrative holds up, in large part due to the asperity of the prose and the prescient description of how fascism can creep into any society that takes freedom for granted.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 20, 2023

She mentions, with some asperity, a phone call from New York when “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” appeared in The New Yorker in 1963.

From New York Times ● Oct. 21, 2021

Arch, cracking with energetic, even contemptuous asperity, it is a world apart from “Everybody.”

From Washington Post ● Jun. 17, 2021

“Now where,” he answered with asperity, “where except in the great tea shop on the main street of the town?”

From "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck

Compared to smooth faults, injection-induced slip on rough faults produces spatially localized clusters of Acoustic Emissions occurring around highly stressed asperities.

From Science Daily ● Jan. 18, 2024

Eco mingled with Milanese avant-garde writers, musicians and painters, and developed a love for late James Joyce, the atonal asperities of Karlheinz Stockhausen and the impenetrable symbolist verse of late Mallarmé.

From The Guardian ● Feb. 20, 2016

Dawkins’s bracing asperities are now routinely met in kind: ‘Puffed up, self-regarding, vain, prickly and militant’ was one columnist’s string of adjectives for him.

From Salon ● Aug. 15, 2015

Coseismic triggering of compact brittle asperities embedded in the ductile fault matrix could explain the relative locations of HF and lower-frequency slip and the apparent lack of HF radiators at shallow depths.

From Science Magazine ● Jun. 16, 2011

Cupid, too, occasionally lent his aid to soften the rugged asperities of the buccaneer's career.

From Cuba Past and Present by Richard Davey