The suffix ish can be used to derive an adjective from a noun, or to suggest a weakened adjectival form. Here we list some odd coinages of words that end with ish, yet more words you are unlikely to find in the dictionary.
"We decided to have them openly talk about it like, let's say, like a modern couple of 25-ish years olds."Emeric Thoa, quoted by Patrick Klepek in Vice, 11 March 2021.
I have watched more movies than almost anyone since the pandemic started (400-ish and counting), and though I am aware of the existence of AFI LISTS, I have never looked at one.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword', 22 May 2021.
Men's jeans tend to have larger pockets, longer inseams, and an extra inch or two in the crotch, and are often sized in accurate-ish waist and length measurements.Mel Compo, Vice, 01 March 2021.
It was through actorish narcissism that he kept aloof.Simon Cowell, 'Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor'.
Her tremor has "progressed" to an almost undetectable circular motion at her chin point, her glacial eyes darting, her lips movable and actorish, her hands busy to animate herself and make her chim more like normal and still beautiful - which it is.Richard Ford, 'I'm Here', in 'Let Me Be Frank With You'.
You think there would be something affairish about it then.Philip Roth, 'Goodbye, Columbus'.
"All-overish: Feeling an undefined sense of unwell that extends to the whole body."The Oxford English Dictionary.
"I must say - I can tell you this even though he's still alive, he's too Alzheimerish to be hurt - that I have my reservations about much of it."John Updike, 'Seek My Face'.
There is, separately, an annual (or annual-ish) appropriations process by which Congress decides how much money the Pentagon and other discretionary agencies should spend in any given year.Matthew Yglesias, Vox, 21 February 2019.
Paint hung in strips off the sides, the bare wood weathered to a gray, antlerish sheen.Tobias Wolff, 'This Boy's Life'.
"We read about Margaritaville. It was 2019. April-ish."Nick Paumgarten, quoting Phil Murphy, The New Yorker, 28 March 2022.
The people of Maine want in. Public and private interests in the state are working to build trading relationships with other Arctic (and Arctic-ish) nations and communities.Tatiana Schlossberg, The Atlantic, 12 February 2019.
"The result may not be authentic, but it is at least, I hope, authentish."Gary Taylor, a professor at Florida State University, describing his effort to reconstruct a presumed Shakespeare play supposedly based on Don Quixote.
"She slept late and took a long autumnish walk with me along the Tuwoosic, during which we talked about a spring driving trip with the children down to the Big Bend Country, something she had been reading about."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
Omensetter's Luck, by William H Gass (1966): Gass's first novel, and his least avant-gardish, and his best.David Foster Wallace, 'Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels'.
It was here in Western Massachusetts, in the summer of 1850, away from the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York, that Melville met a man who would change the course of his life.Philip Hoare, 'The Whale'.
This put me in a baddish mood, but I figured hey, it's Friday, things'll loosen up in other parts of the grid.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword', 21 May 2021.
Laurence, blondish, baldish, and unwholesomely fat, was criticizing the head of the French Department.Vladimir Nabokov, 'Pnin'
The man nodded toward a stout, bankerish-looking fellow in a tyrolean hat with a moth-green feather, standing nearer to the tree and the moth than any of them.Michael Chabon, 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay'.
To put it in a simpler, more book-reviewish way: neither of these novels is very good.David Foster Wallace, 'Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama'.
BookTube is the unofficial name given to a collection of YouTube channels that discuss all things bookish.Jolie Doggett, Huffington Post, 24 April 2019.
In 1995, a local bank underwrote the publication of a boosterish pictorial history of Martinsville and enlisted Stutgen to provide the text.Mark Singer, 'Somewhere in America'.
In one corner a number of executives, trying to pass the time, were doing vicious imitations of Paulson, Geithner, and Cox. "Ahhhh, ummm, ahhhh, ummm," one banker muttered, adopting Paulson's stammer. "Work harder, get smarter!" another shouted, mocking Geithner's Boy Scoutish exhortations.Andrew Ross Sorkin, 'Too Big To Fail'.
"A track branched off from the road beyond the cemetery, a track of soft, brick-coloured dust, winding among the darker, still-brickish stretches of an almond orchard."Joanna Trollope, 'A Spanish Lover'.
There, Graham and Trump discovered their mutual love for bro-ish trash talk and golf.Lisa Miller, New York Magazine, September 2018.
She knew the precise number of tiny bronze-ish hexagonal floor tiles in the stall (482).Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
Brainstorming sessions on cakeishness, held in a special room at the Madison Avenue offices of Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn (painted yellow to stimulate creative thinking) produced a slew of footnotes to Dichter's core insight.Karal Ann Marling, 'As Seen on TV'.
"The police station occupies part of the new brick-and-glass car-dealerish Village Hall where I rode out the heart-sore days of my divorce."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
Chulentish, I think, like the heavy bean chulent we eat for lunch.Pearl Abraham, 'The Romance Reader'.
"I see you for what you are," Shawn said. His eyes were wild. "You pretend to be saintly and churchish."Tara Westover, 'Educated'.
Babbage's Mechanical Notation, a circuit-diagrammish code for transcribing the interrelationships of moving parts, was one of his proudest achievements, though like the Analytical Engine its usefulness was hard for his contemporaries to grasp.Sydney Padua, 'The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage'.
A clinking of bottle-openers releases a gurgle of smuggled-in vodka; voices rise and fall in clubbish collusion.Colin Thubron, 'Among the Russians'.
But my appetite for the vulgar, the obvious, the cornballish had not yet been sated.Joe Queenan, 'Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon'.
Though Madeline's voice was shrill and cornfieldish after Leora's lazy softness, she read so eagerly that he was sick ashamed of his intention to hurt her.Sinclair Lewis, 'Arrowsmith'.
Several of D'Agata's most dickish replies have been cherry-picked for inclusion.Laura Miller, Salon, 08 February 2012.
On occasion, Gervais does genuinely speak truth to power, but much of the time he's just, well, being kind of a dick. So we’ve separated the shocks from the sneers, the big swings from the petty jabs, and ranked them from most to least dickish.Sam Adams, Slate, 05 January 2020.
As a child, she was known for being what one observer called don't-careish.Hilton Als, The New Yorker, 01 March 2021.
"Sometimes we see a cloud that's dragonish."Shakespeare, 'Antony and Cleopatra'.
"Even the major causes of guilt and anxiety had slid away into some distant limbo and not only failed to emerge in the small hours as tormentors but appeared to have lost their dragonish validity."Patrick Fermor, 'A Time to Keep Silence'.
"Although Papa only drinks a glass of negus," writes his daughter Emily some years later, "somehow or other he contrives to be drunkish."Emily Lamb, quoted by David Cecil in 'Melbourne'.
The loser was gravity, and a similar suspension of natural law was visible among the skateboarders, who dwell in a haze of dudeish fellowship where age has no dominion.Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, 16 August 2021.
There we were, six male writers and some wives, the men having achieved various footholds of success in their writing lives, their pitons dug deep into a rock wall, hairlines receded or vanished or else the hair itself staying resiliently wiry and Einstein-clownish.Meg Wolitzer, 'The Wife'.
The Maples were left with each other and a profusion of cigarette butts and empytish glasses.John Updike, 'The Red Herring Theory'.
All this work attests to the reputation of the most often attempted, most rarely summited, of all mountainous modern books, Proust's multivolume 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu', which, first Englished as 'Remembrance of Things Past', is now routinely more severely Frenchified as 'In Search of Lost Time'.Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, 10 May 2021.
The author/translator's English seems rudimentary at best, and the actual line-by-line prose of WN is so stiff and clunky, or else riddled with ESL-ish solecisms as to make the reader suffer that terrible embarrassed-for-someone-else feeling on the author's behalf.David Foster Wallace, 'Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama'.
Even now he entertained passionate affections - an aristocratic widow, and a young actress for who he had build a bathing-hut by the edge of the dark, Excaliburish lake.Colin Thubron, 'Among the Russians'.
Marie France was all right, Maura thought, a little pouty and shruggy and eyes-up-to-heavenish, but maybe that was the way twenty-year old French girls banished to learn English behaved.Maeve Binchy, 'This Year It Will Be Different'.
"What is it, a report on bird calls? What does it even stand for?"An exchange in the movie 'In the Loop'.
"I can't recall, but it's factish."
It will have the kindly aid of all other varieties of professional messiahs, ranging from fantoddish prophets of milleniums to the downright thieves.H L Mencken, 2 November 1936.
He's called Marc Mulheren in the movie, and Mike's character is called Matt Pandamiglio. Those names seem to signal that the movie is fiction-ish.Slate magazine, 23 August 2012.
Clarissa's name was absent, but when the chart disappeared her face, so beautiful and film-star-ish, filled the screen.Ruth Rendell, 'No Man's Nightingale'.
Babbage himself drew up tantalizingly flowchartish figures for understanding the complex flow of numbers around his Analytical Engine.Sydney Padua, 'The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage'.
Electric lights were off for siesta, and a sweet fodderish rain fragrance hung in the deputy's office.Richard Ford, 'The Ultimate Good Luck'.
There was a second song, a melody more lyrical and poignant than the first, and the voice that dominated now was Ronit's, leading with her folksingerish, fervent soprano.Philip Roth, 'The Counterlife'.
The use of this Forest Gump-ish device - i.e. of inserting actual famous mathematicians into the fictions plot and dialogue - implies that UPGC is written for readers who are at least familiar enough with higher math to know who Hardy, Ramanujan, Goedel and Turing are.David Foster Wallace, 'Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama'.
There were a lot of languages back in the olden days with syntax similar to that. It is FORTRANish, but more likely something else.A response on Stack Overflow to the question 'What language was this code written in?', 18 April 2013.
This answer [OHOH] seems to be popping up frequently-ish lately, clued in various iterations, though perhaps most commonly in a classroom, 'call on me' type context.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword', 06 August 2022.
SHAPEWEAR actually seems like a freshish entry (13A: Some spandex garments).Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword', 11 June 2022.
It looked authentic and frontierish but it was new and touristy, not really interesting, a fit place to find oblivion.Ruth Rendell, 'No Night is Too Long'.
In the fuggish room, a man straddled a chair that was turned backwards.Shirley Hazzard, 'The Great Fire'.
It is twilight. I've slept for hours without believing I slept at all, and feel no longer fuguish but exhausted, as though I'd dreamed of running a race, my legs heavy and achy clear up to my groin.Richard Ford, 'Independence Day'.
For sure, Parker and Stone can be irritating, and not always in the gadflyish ways they intend.Jonah Weiner, Slate Magazine, 29 April 2010.
If it's a Gnu-ish project, they'll probably have all their documentation online.Miro Stoyanov, 02 May 2011.
Tania thinks there is something very Hollywood about borrowing and wearing a man's bathrobe in his apartment. Hollywood and sexily Goldilocks-ish.Christopher Sorrentino, 'Trance'.
"A father who drugs his children?" Jonah said, and he reached for anything nearby, his hand coming upon the banjo, which he swung wide, smacking Barry Claimes in the face once with an awful, gongish, vibrato.Meg Wolitzer, 'The Interestings'.
This forms a perfect context for Laughton's J. J. Bealer, a performance of Graham Greene-ish complexity.Simon Cowell, 'Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor'.
There was something gymnasiumish about the stairwell, and the smell in it wasn't that different from a gymnasium either.Curtis Sittenfeld, 'Prep'.
"Alf has to be up betimes," said Mrs Lovell, looking more gypsy-ish than ever.Ruth Rendell, 'A Guilty Thing Surprised'.
"George Bush is almost always outdoors, coatless, sometimes with his sleeves rolled up, and looks ebullient and Happy Warrior-ish.Jeff Greenfield, quoted by Joan Didion, 'Political Fictions'.
"Now we just squeeze the venom glands, which are hereish."The TV show 'MacGyver'.
"There's nothing high-schoolish about it, Dad!"Anne Tyler, 'Noah's Compass'.
It's like Charley Lau used to tell us, used to tell me: You look very hitterish up there. You look hitterish, you look like you're going to hit the ball hard.
In the hourish I spend at Dunkin', all kinds of people pass through - painters in Jackson Pollocked boots, electricians and a construction worker perpetually stretching his sore shoulders.Maggie Hennessy, 'Observations from a Chicago Dunkin Donuts', Salon. 24 July 2021.
Here's the vibe: Imagine Handler hungoverish at the 10-items-or-less counter at Safeway, swinging her basket of goods — a home pregnancy test, a Boston cream pie, a handle of designer booze—up to the conveyor belt.Troy Patterson, Slate Magazine, 02 April 2010.
And so I was excited to visit the new store. This wasn’t a chain – it was that mythical creature the independent bookstore. Or independentish: it's owned by a holding company with one other branch in New York.Emma Brockes, The Guardian, 14 December 2018.
But the show debuted, in 2019, on Comedy Central, where it joined a slate of excellent and underwatched indie-ish sitcoms, including 'Workaholics', 'Detroiters', and 'The Other Two'.Doreen St Felix, The New Yorker, 13 December 2021.
"He was, after all, a minor celebrity, ish."Colin Bateman, 'Cycle of Violence'.
"Besides which, there's nothing much to see except the motorway and a lot of Krautish industrialists hurrying south in their Mercedes towards the bum-boys of Naples."John Mortimer, 'Summer's Lease'.
"There was always something wrong with every one of them. None of them looked quite lakish enough."Marcus Garvie, describing his efforts to construct a mathematical model of the geometry of a lake from satellite imagery, (personal communication).
'Twain' is a very poetic way to say 'DUO', so that clue too seemed very literaryish.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword', 6 February 2021.
Beside it sat a log-cabinish kind of office.Herman Koch, 'Summer House with Swimming Pool'.
Francis seemed to be in what she called one of his loose-endish moods this afternoon.Barbara Pym, 'Crampton Hodnet'.
He had a bizarre way of speaking that mixed blusters, non sequiturs, and even rhyming verse into a sort of Mad Hatter-ish patois.Ed Catmull, 'Creativity, INC'.
Woven between the human dramas are Malcolm Gladwell-ish examinations of the surprising science and statistics of drug use, and of the varying success of drug policies.Decca Aitkenhead, The Guardian, 02 January 2015.
Bo led a resurgence of Mao-ish culture - choirs tens of thousands strong bellowing revolutionary hymns, television schedules saturated with Mao-era classics, government servants sent down to the countryside.Julia Lovell, 'Maoism: A Global History'.
For his new Apple TV+ comedy series, Gordon-Levitt imagined what his life might have been like if he hadn't been so lucky. "It's probably the most me-ish thing I’ve ever made."New York Times, 30 July 2021.
Relative difficulty: Mediumish?Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword', 11 September 2020.
Everything about the Hildebrandts is middle-ish.Laura Miller, Slate magazine, 27 September 2021.
"What the capital needed was a network of these amazing institutions, a sanitary cordon of monasteries where the prayers of the monks would secure the town from harm without and from the Midianitish prowling of evil within."Patrick Fermor, 'A Time to Keep Silence'.
"All around me, almost immediately, people begin to converse in the soft nasilish voices and mildish sentiments familiar from my college days."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
"Come, Cressy, that's a foolish, missish thing to say."Lolah Burford, 'Vice Avenged'.
"Her absence had better be weekish and not monthish, you know what I'm saying?"Dialogue on the 'reality' TV show 'Dog the Bounty Hunter'.
"Have another of the calamares. They're moreish, aren't they?"Peter Lovesey, 'Beau Death'.
I said `The Exodus story is myth?' and Father Tom said 'mythish'.Julia Sweeney, 'Letting Go of God'.
"All around me, almost immediately, people begin to converse in the soft nasilish voices and mildish sentiments familiar from my college days."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
Essentially, many normal-ish people have made a huge bet against gigantic financial institutions and are currently winning.Jason Koebler, The Verge, 27 January 2021.
Radford's approch might be seen as even more heavy-handed were it not so curiously inept in its O. Henry-ish ambitions.Ron Rosenbaum, 'The Shakespeare Wars'.
Tired of Afghanistan and all those messy, oil-ish wars in the Greater Middle East that just don't seem to pan out?Salon, 02 May 2011.
The Cavaliere's collection of paintings, hitherto Old Masterish, now included several dozen gouaches and oils by local artists depicting the volcanic scenery and the natives in gaudy costume, frolicking.Susan Sontag, 'The Volcano Lover'.
"Jack Levine was big before the war and in the 'forties, and Zack had an especial dislike for him, I think because he could do all those Old Master-ish things - draw anatomy, work with shadows and light - that Zack couldn't do if his life depended on it, any more than he could assemble an evenly lit pseudo-Renaissance tableau like Benton."John Updike, 'Seek My Face'.
His gaze went back and forth...from Sara's long, slightly Olive Oyl-ish neck to Bev's long but also wattled scrag.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
This is a standard requirement of U.S. commencement speeches: the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories.David Foster Wallace, 'Kenyon Commencement Address'.
MSCHF’s head of commerce Daniel Greenberg told VICE that they'd "always talked about" doing a Satan-themed drop, and the premiere of Lil Nas X's Paradise Lost-ish video for "Montero (Call Me By Your Name)" gave them the perfect opportunity.Jelisa Castrodale, Vice, 30 March 2021.
"One summer weekend in 2004, when Mr. Louie’s wife-to-be was on a cruise in Alaska with her parents, he discovered through a newspaper ad what seemed like the perfect place, a pastel town house near the boardwalk in Rockaway, Queens. Well, perfect-ish."The New York Times, 21 January 2010.
Refactoring a messy oop [Object Oriented Programming] codebase is such a nightmare, compared to a more pipelineish fp [Functional Programming] solution.A comment by 'ken-amazing' on the Reddit topic 'Object-Oriented Programming, The Trillion Dollar Disaster'.
I only knew that her being poorish, like me, brought her closer to me and made her more accessible.Ruth Rendell, 'No Night is Too Long'.
Some passages are inescapably Pooterish, but Rousseau sees himself in these pages as not just a man; he represents humanity, in all its moral, emotional, and physical complexity.David Edmonds, John Eidinow, 'Rousseau's Dog'.
"Indeed, the more shyly bookish, the more likely he is to be secretly porkish."Aldous Huxley, 'Brief Candles'.
His voice was poshish but not as posh as Mum's put-on posh.David Mitchell, 'Black Swan Green'.
Geomedizin was exactly the kind of quackish totalizing system of thought that Fleck castigated in his book.Arthur Allen, 'The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr Weigl'.
Assuming the book is nonfiction - Sedaris calls the events portrayed realish, and in a recent interview suggested his work was "97 percent...true" - he has passed the time in the fashion one imagines.Vanessa Grigoriadis, The New York Times Book Review, 29 June 2008.
And "I WANNA LOOK" sounds realistic-ish, but a bit only -ish: I can hear "I WANNA SEE!" much much more readily in my head.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword', 19 June 2021.
Much as I wanted to support something indie and something recentish, I didn't like the idea of watching a documentary about America's war on terror amidst a group of men clad in thobes.Lisa Kirchner, 'Hello American Lady Creature'.
Right next to him, there's me, his sometime sister, my face already a conundrum, flashing like a lenticular decal between two images: the dark-eyed, pretty little girl I used to be; and the severe, aquiline-nosed Roman-coinish person I am today.Jeffrey Eugenides, 'Middlesex'.
"It is aways a cumbersome, somewhat root canalish experience," said Erin Riordan, of Naperville, Ill., who has five children and manages an account with six lines from AT&T that produces a $495 monthly bill.Wall Street Journal, 31 July 2013.
I'd been queasy about what I wanted our son to call me. Mommy sounded babyish, Ma rube-ish, Mum servile.Lionel Shriver, 'We Need to Talk About Kevin'.
The people attending the play were a safe-ish distance from the bomb.Lisa Kirchner, 'Hello American Lady Creature'.
She seems at ease with her exceptional state, and will one day be confused, I suspect, to live somewhere with many people her same-ish size.Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker, 15/22 February 2021.
"You have to have an eye - a savantish ability to recognize work that is symptomatic of an artist with real intelligence, originality, and drive."Sarah Thornton, 'Seven Days in the Art World'.
"Stories is Google Plus's New Scrapbook-ish Feature in Search of a Purpose"Headline in Slate magazine, 22 May 2014.
"Terrorists used these poor, shantyish, unpoliceable islands as hideouts."Robert Kaplan, 'Imperial Grunts'.
Elwin was momentarily struck by the signt, by the Sistine Chapel-ish disparity between his hand and his father's.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
But if Lamb had skills underneath his slobbish exterior, speed wasn't among them.Mick Herron, 'Slow Horses'.
Flush with a sense of possibility, the correspondent started wearing the two snowsuit-ish bags.Henry Alford, The New Yorker, 25 January 2021.
The New Sober-ishHeadline for an article about microdosing hallucinogenic drugs, Vox, 30 March 2022.
Also, enjoy the crabapple tree while you can, it's mostly dead at this point and we’ll be replacing it soonish.John Scalzi, blog 'Whatever', 10 June 2021.
The consensus idea was to propose massive earthen berms, like river levees, surrounding an assortment of twenty-five foot granite monoliths which the materials scientist Carrollton assured them wouldn't be as cryptically Stonehenge-ish as they sounded.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
He needs a way out of this shutdown, and a "national emergency" to build the wall, whether it materializes or not, has the stunt-ish sheen he’s looking for.Jim Newell, Slate magazine, 07 January 2019.
Now it's called 'The Oxford Book of American Poetry'. 'Verse' sounded too tea-tableish by that time.Nicholson Baker, 'The Anthologist'.
24 Tech (and Tech-ish) Gifts Under $50 That You Can Buy on AmazonHeadline from New York Magazine, December 2018.
"Thai-ish steamed fish with curry custard"Headline in Salon magazine, 31 January 2010.
Only a very writerly writer indeed would drag you around a wholly metaphorical phorest phor an entire page, then remind you of how theory-ish it all was by ending with an allusion to "...the woods of this sentence."
"My goal in life is to become an adjective," Leonard said. "People should go around saying 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or: 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste.'Jeffrey Eugenides, 'The Marriage Plot'.
"Bankheadian has a ring," Madeleine said.
"It's better than Bankheadesque."
"Or Bankheadish."
"Ish is terrible all around. There's Joycean, Shakespearean, Faulknerian. But ish? Who is there who's an ish?"
"Thomas Mannish?"
"I do not think you would know Henry with his hair powdered and dressed in a very tonish style."Claire Tomalin, quoting a letter in 'Jane Austen: A Life'.
The daughter was a bit trampish, more than willing to sleep with the TVA agent because she saw him as her only ticket off the island.Nancy Isenberg, 'White Trash'.
Seemed a bit trivia-testish at times.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword', 24 July 2021.
Research that trigger warnings might not be all that helpful has been mounting over a few studies, including the one that Jones and his colleagues published last year titled "Trigger Warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead." Yes, that title is trollish, but here is what they did: They had a few hundred participants read several passages, some of which were potentially disturbing.Shannon Palus, Slate Magazine, 12 July 2019.
They were wearing the uniform of the Lagos youngish and wealthyish - leather slippers, jeans, and open-neck tight shirts, all with familiar designer logos - but there was in their manner the plowing eageress of men in need.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 'Americanah'.
"Her absence had better be weekish and not monthish, you know what I'm saying?"Dialogue on the 'reality' TV show 'Dog the Bounty Hunter'.
It is the literary mechanism by which we see the whale, the default evocation of anything whalishPhilip Hoare, 'The Whale'.
I'd lie awake thinking of things like this, but then my mind would return to the freshly dead, who were most often whole, or at least whole-ish.David Sedaris, 'When You Are Engulfed in Flames'.
David Stokes, 49, who shook hands with Mr. Brown on the train platform in Southampton, said that he had been pleasantly surprised to find that the prime minister was not shifty, ill at ease or wonkish.The New York Times, 27 April 2010.
After his drubbing just now he is in a Zen-ish sort of mood, not to say downright sarcastic.John Burdett, 'Bangkok 8'.