mordancy

Nonetheless, this English rendering lies lifeless on the page, devoid of the mordancy of the Spanish original.

With what seems gratuitous mordancy, The Guardian observes that "the family set about educating him as a model Englishman, with only partial success" (Danchev and Vainker 2013).

The sharp refinement of that sensibility devolves somewhat in the late 1920s and after, verging at times on kitsch; textures reveal an almost airbrushed luminosity rather than the hard-edged mordancy through which his best work distinguishes itself.

If his chucklehead countrymen's function is to amuse the world, his own function is to amuse himself, and the happy few who find his antic mordancy to their taste.

When the narrator mocks his fear of cemeteries and conjure men, Aurisio also boasts about his daring and bravery and reacts to Jose's mordancy by violently disparaging blacks (and explicitly connecting conjuring and blackness): "I don't like black buzzards .

And remember how Marcel was traumatized for the length of Proust's novel, from boyhood to deathbed, by the casualness with which Francoise rings a chicken's neck: he wonders interminably at the mordancy of her care.