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

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

From Washington Post ● Jun. 17, 2021

With asperity but also love, “Slave Play” lets us all see ourselves in the muddle that is race in America now.

From New York Times ● Oct. 6, 2019

“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

But time had softened old asperities; and we had been on affectionate terms for many years past.

From A New Medley of Memories by Hunter-Blair, David