GoryJory's $10 Words

This may signal their anomie, but, given the dull talk, they may merely be bored. —Movie review: "The Canyons" (erotic thriller by director, Paul Scrader w/Lindsay Lohan), New York Times (Aug 1, 2013)

The game became my bête noire, a lingering reminder of my inadequacy.

Ms. Dorsen, who directed the very non-bot rock musical “Passing Strange,” recently spoke with ArtsBeat about how language, dramaturgy and talking machines inspired her show.

And to become a literary man is to join the age of the epigone – the copycat.

A sort of modern epistolary novel, the book incorporates emails, memos, handwritten letters, magazine articles, police reports and other written materials. —Los Angeles Times (Feb 25, 2015) Richard-linklater-in-talks-to-direct-'where'd-you-go-Bernadette?'

He belonged to the fighting class, and was further distinguished as a hero of debate, who professed the eristic art. --Plato

is also used to describe someone who is irresponsible, incompetent, inept, or without purpose in life. "artfully feckless" .... "feckless mimicry"

That fillip is an unspoken homage to Dumas, whose grandmother was an African slave in Haiti.

Then I remembered a term from psychology, the “fluency heuristic,” which explains that an idea seems more valuable if it’s easier to say or think. —Stop procrastinating article, Time (May 25, 2014)

But she liked his work, and her imprimatur soon made Mr. Lucas London’s most sought-after portrait maker of the stars.

Today, little is left of the loose and louche Tangier that Jane left behind. —Books blog: The Madness of Queen Jane, The New Yorker (Jun 13, 2014)

The play, by contrast, feels lugubrious, overwritten and burdened with chewy moralizing.

There are so many choices for the nadir of post-Halloween slasher flicks.

And even in man, only as man is supernatural, above nature, noetic.

This exquisite volume may be justly designated as the nonpareil of its kind.

The spurious Shelley letters were, as might have been expected, nugatory, barren of any new revelations of Shelley’s character.

The language of the past is always oracular: you will only understand it as builders of the future who know the present. --Nietzsche

It is well structured, mirroring the hefty book which accompanied the TV series, though the recaps of previous episodes become otiose on DVD.

There’s a palimpsest of modern-art history in the titanium, limestone, steel, and glass composition. —Article on Architect Frank Gehry, The New Yorker (Oct 27, 2014)

The penurious, parsimonious, and miserly save money by disgraceful self-denial, and the niggardly by meanness in their dealing with others. —Noah Webster

The new Pope soon struck the phrase “perfidious Jews” from the Easter liturgy. --Newsweek (Mar 8, 2013)

But his strictures seem not to apply to soloists. --St. Petersburg Philharmonic plays Carnegie Hall, New York Times (Feb 17, 2014)

At moments they recall Wodehouse, at others Waugh, but they are always entirely sui generis, elegantly written, witty and adult. --Book review: "Lost for Words" by Edward St. Aubyn, Washington Post

“It is no use their bringing sybaritic appetites here,” she said. (Unless she's inviting you over for champagne brunches and showering you with gifts — in which case you should keep your mouth shut.) "Hedonistic sybarite"

“He was a complete tyro,” Mr. Callow wrote, “discovering a new medium and unsure how it would work.” --Early film by Orson Welles is rediscovered, New York Times (Aug 7, 2013)