asperity

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.

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.

Soft scene, daring demonstration, I would not have; and I stood in peril of both: a weapon of defence must be prepared—I whetted my tongue: as he reached me, I asked with asperity, “whom he was going to marry now?”

But he was set right there by Mrs. Bennet, who assured him with some asperity that they were very well able to keep a good cook, and that her daughters had nothing to do in the kitchen.

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