We'd need to double the size of the dictionary if we wanted to include all the words that we invent on the fly, let alone all the understandable words we COULD invent. As one instance of how many words are out there, consider the fact that you can, and you do, make adjectives out of almost any noun by tacking on the letter "y". The result may be strange, unmusical, and silly-sounding, but your audience will know exactly what you meant.
"Golden Exits" is the quietest, sparest, least action-y film Perry has made yet, to the point where it seems to be the result of a dare somebody made with him: "Can you make an entire feature about people that can't appreciate what they have and are incapable of getting out of their own way?"Matt Seitz
Ernest was self-conscious in an actory way, his reading was false, and he could scarcely take his eyes from the beauty of Burton's head.Alec Guinness, "Blessings in Disguise".
He later told me I struck him as a little bit actor-y.Laurence Olivier, "Confessions of an Actor."
For three hours she held Coleman entranced by her comedy, her outrage, her hair, and by her flair for manufacturing excitement, by a frenzied, untrained adolescent intellect and an actressy ability to enkindle herself and believe her every exagerration.Philip Roth, 'The Human Stain'.
Mashihi describes herself not at an actor but as an act-y person.Emily Gould, 'Let Sharon Mashihi whisper in your ear', New York, 1-14 February 2022
Y So Creative? A Very Adjective-y LetterHeadline in Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
"Like I'd be all pissed and adrenaline-y, like 'Who does that geebag think she is, I should've punched her face in...'".Tana French, "The Trespasser".
For my military knowledge, though I'm plucky and adventury,W S Gilbert, "The Pirates of Penzance".
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century;
But still, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral,
I am the very model of a modern Major-General.
Is that, like, not advice-y enough?The last episode of the HBO series 'Mare of Easttown'.
He praised the ratings for the overtly pro-Trump 'Fox & Friends' and the similarly advocate-y One America News Network.Chris Cilizza, cnn.com, 13 May 2019.
The sun shone, the sky was blue, all seemed to lovely and afternoony and summery.D H Lawrence, 'The Lovely Lady'.
She says male fragrances do tend to be "fresher" smelling than female ones. This is likely what was responsible for the piney/minty/alcohol-y odor I was picking up.Olga Khazan, the Atlantic, 03 December 2018.
A farm-wife with worn-out fingers sold us a massive bear-claw, and I tore off little bits and fed them to Mike, then licked the almondy crumbs from my fingertips.Anne Packer, "The Dive from Clausen's Pier"
EEC (6D: Onetime trade org.), which is one of those old-timey alphabet-soupy initialisms I can never keep track of because I don't know anything about them except that they appear in crosswords.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 16 April 2022.
If she'd said, thanks for abiding by one of the fifty commandments of our sick-ass, Amish-y religion.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
STEWART (ANGSTY) AND COLBERT (NOT) RETURN, GAZING AT NAVELS AND NEWS.The New York Times, 09 January 2008.
AN ANGSTY LEADING MAN WHO CAUGHT THE SPIRIT OF HIS TIMESThe New York Times, 31 July 2008.
Advertisers are perplexed and a little angst-y.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
So, for those keeping score at home, here's a watercooler-ready cheat-sheet on several (but not all!) of the Senate Republicans who, as of the latest rollout, remained publicly angsty about the bill, along with the particulars they say are bugging them.Atlantic magazine online, July 2017.
In the stairwell scene, lines like "It's a long way up, but it's worth it" are clearly weighted with double meaning in a way that seemed pretty anvil-y for this show.Slate, 26 July 2012.
"What's the neighborhood like?"The Extras Special Series Finale.
"Well, it's got lots of Asians and blacks, and it does get very Araby towards the high street."
"Then why do you wear them?""Breaking Bad", Season 1, Episode 3.
"I wear them for support. My arches happen to be very archy."
The hard-to-please Housman praised [Richard Bentley] for the "firm strength and piercing edge and arrowy swiftness of his intellect, his matchless facility and adroitness and resource".Nicholson Baker, 'Essays and Other Lumber'.
I had been an Asperger's-y movie fan when I got to Los Angeles three months earlier.Patton Oswalt, 'Silver Screen Fiend'.
As the situation requires, Mitchell also draws on the interviewing styles - variously confrontational and ass-kissy - of Peter Bogdanovich, Charlie Rose, and James Lipton.Slate magazine, 07 July 2008.
"My husband likes to see a full refrig when he gets home, you know? He opens the door, grabs something Atkins-y, pours himself a glass of wine."Susan Isaacs, 'Any Place I Hang My Hat'.
She asked attacky questions and behaved very badly he said, being weirdly paternalistic.Salon magazine, 10 August 2015.
Another atticky bedroom with an en suite shower lurked under the roof tiles, lit by skylights.William Boyd, 'Armadillo'.
I guess AUDIO-VISUAL AID is a broad category that includes "slides", so it's not wrong, but I would've liked something more audio-y there, for clarity's sake.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 17 September 2022.
For a long time, the only discernible libertarian around here was Jack Shafer, a man unable to wean himself from speech, guns, and other annoying constitutional amendments. But lately, other folks seem to be getting a bit Ayn Randy.Slate Magazine, 22 September 2009.
"She's wearing an Aztecky poncho thing over thigh-hugging black jeans, and holding something against her breasts."David Mitchell, 'Slade House'.
"Surely it had now shed much of that shallowness, superficiality, mindlessness, and provincialism of the 1920's, with its Prohibition, its mad rush for a buck, its bloodless Coolidge in the White House, its isolationism, its Babbitty culture dominated by the Rotary and the Chambers of Commerce."William Shirer, 'The Nightmare Years: 1930-1940'.
"We've used [a bacon sizzling] sound to flip the flavour of bacon and egg ice cream. If we play that sound over the loudspeakers in the room, the ice cream will taste more bacony than if you play the sound of, say, farmyard chickens."BBC News, quoting a winner of the 2008 IgNobel Awards.
"At my very worst I have it VERY easy compared to just about every character acting out their miserable back-stabby lives in 'Ozark'."Kelly McClure, Salon, 02 May 2022.
"I know all this, and am inspired to write hokey, bad-author-y phrases about it, because I am on a rather lengthy trip from Fresno, California, to Las Vegas."Paul Shirley, in 'Can I Keep My Jersey: 11 Teams, 5 Countries, and 4 Years in My Life as a Basketball Vagabond'.
My ankle was balloony and limp.David Mitchell, 'Black Swan Green'.
She never wore dresses; just those peasant skirts or balloony slacks.Anne Tyler, 'Noah's Compass'.
"I loved the White Album. I felt we were getting back together as a band. There was a lot of bandy tracks."Ringo Starr, in a television interview, 2008.
"Across the lot was the Manasquan Bar, a barny old hip-roofed fisherman's roadhouse with a red BAR sign on top."Richard Ford, "The Sportswriter".
"One vintage, according to Wine Spectator, 'smells barnyardy and tastes decayed.'"Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner, "Think Like a Freak".
"I came here long ago, when I was in college, to a dense, festering old barrely dancehall called the Walled Lake Casino."Richard Ford, "The Sportswriter".
We're having a great time throwing the balls. Sometimes we throw them to each other, sometimes up at the ceiling trying to break the light bulb, or sometimes at Weiss when he looks as if he might be trying to get up. Every time we throw a ball, we yell out something basebally.William Wharton, 'Birdy'.
Wow, it's look a whole new basement. It doesn't feel basementy.The home improvement show 'Love It or List it'.
The filmmaking doesn't give you much chance to appreciate the costumes and sets, which might be the point; the production looks rather basic cable-y.Salon Magazine, 02 April 2011.
"Did you find a parking space okay?" I asked.Steve Martin, "The Pleasure of My Company".
"Oh yes."
I said they'd been hard to find because of the beachy weather.
What's more, Felix Krull, Mann's first-person account of a charming confidence man - a faker of the first degree - is really fun to read: I daresay beachy.Sara Dickerman, Slate Magazine, 02 August 2010.
I remember watching Cliff Richard movies on TV when I was an adolescent, mostly notably the beatniky-looking, black-and-white 'Espresso Bongo' and a bouncy musical called 'Summer Holiday'.
BEEFCAKEY ADVENTURE ON THE ROMAN EMPIRE FRINGE.Headline in Salon magazine, 9 February 2011.
My mother buys the same three pairs of beige-y sling backs every few years, as heel styles change, at Lady Continental.Cynthia Kaplan, 'Why I'm Like This'.
The retired neurosurgeon was uncharacteristically peppy and characteristically bible-y at the RNC on Tuesday.Salon magazine, 19 July 2016.
Thank you, Kirk Cameron, for that incredible, Bible-y introduction.Arrested Development, Season 4, Episode 11.
He loathes everything about Obamacare, with its Big Brothery regulations and mandates and taxes - too many of which, he feels, are preserved, and in some cases expanded, by the GOP plan.Atlantic online magazine, July 2017.
Ivan was wearing a biscuity tweed suit and a floppy, oyster gray bow tie.William Boyd, 'Armadillo'.
Bleachy hotel sheets did not bother him, nor did he care about noisy air-conditioner vents, slow room service, or bad food.Allegra Goodman, 'Intuition'.
"'I'm sure glad to see you," she says, giving me a happy smile in the blinky TV light."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
But it wouldn't be very bloggy to end without giving each side one more shot, now would it?
the web ecosystem will always be bloggy at its core.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
Including RSVPED after you've already subjected me to NBAMVPS just feels bludgeony.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 12 February 2021.
Listening to her read, I aspired to be the Professor - to live in a small booky shack in an overgrown garden.Nicholson Baker, 'Essays and Other Lumber'.
That is so good, and so twisty, and so shadowy, and so chewy, and so boomerangy, that it requires the forging of a new word for "beauty".John McPhree, 'The Anthologist'.
The concentrate boom is the boomiest boom since the Brazilian rubber boom.John McPhree, 'Oranges'.
"You guys don't even know if it's dark or light out. Here, let me show you!"The Sarah Silverman Show.
"Well, technically it's overcast."
"Yeah, kind of bothy."
She hears a couple of hesitant steps, then a glassy, bottley sound and a heavy thump.Tibor Fischer, 'The Collector Collector'.
It was the only boutiquey fabric store in town and it had prices to match, but I loved it...Anne Packer, 'The Dive from Clausen's Pier'.
For some reason, this episode of @SHO_Masters seems especially bowtie-y.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
Certain words emanated a new significance: "night", "teacher", "foreign", even "math", and Charlotte looked for ways to say these words because each utterance gave her a bowelly pinch of pleasure, like plucking a string.Jennifer Egan, 'Look at Me'.
"Though in the two years since my divorce I've sometimes walked out in these winding, bowery streets after dark on some ruminative errand or other and looked in at these same houses, windows lit with bronzy cheer, dark cars hove to the curbs, the sound of laughing and glasses tinking and spirited chatter floating out, and thought to myself: what good rooms these are."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
One is always suspicious of bills with Boy Scouty names like this, and one is always justified.Patrick Smith, Salon, 24 December 2014.
One of us was recently informed by a first grader, over dinner, that the first grader's friends included "girls, boys, girly boys and boyey girls."Ramona Faith Oswald, Libby Balter Blume, Stephen Marks, "Decentering Heteronormativity: A Model For Family Studies", in "Sourcebook of Family Theory and Research", edited by Vern Bengtson.
I don't know why, but I'm in a breakfasty kind of mood.Billy Crudup as Henry Roth, in 'Dedication'.
"Choices are what we all need. And when I walk out into the bricky warp of these American cities, that is exactly what I feel."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
Lucia ponders the suggestion. Finally she chants with her eyes closed, "Bray, maybe, with a suggestion of purple in it. Not bridesmaidy".Elinor Lipman, 'Then She Found Me'.
"Give her a real bridey wedding with all the fixings!"The character Annie Johnson in Douglas Sirk's 'Imitation of Life'.
Well, she said, Britishy, fancy meeting you here.Douglas Hobbie, 'The Day'.
"You've made a lot of bro-ey movies."Billy Eichner, in 'Billy on the Street', to Seth Rogen.
Guy Ritchie’s entirely brainless, totally enjoyable fantasy reveals the bro-y side of the Arthurian legend.Subhead, Slate Magazine, 12 May 2017.
"Though in the two years since my divorce I've sometimes walked out in these winding, bowery streets after dark on some ruminative errand or other and looked in at these same houses, windows lit with bronzy cheer, dark cars hove to the curbs, the sound of laughing and glasses tinking and spirited chatter floating out, and thought to myself: what good rooms these are."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
"A nurse with broomy hair ran slap-bang into me."David Mitchell, 'Black Swan Green'.
"She was not so beautiful as Tess, and she wore a bunchy school tunic, but her father's vitality illumined her face.Ruth Rendell, 'Sins of the Fathers'.
There are ferns, and bunchy groves where violets and lily of the valley will appear when September comes around.Shirley Hazzard, 'The Great Fire'.
"No offense to my dad or anything, but this guy is not so businessmanny."Anne Packer, 'The Dive from Clausen's Pier'.
Another plaid-shirted, blue-jeaned wavy-haired, big-wallet trucker is now waiting midway of the lobby, glomming a sheaf of businessy-looking papers, staring hatchets at me as if I were on his private line.Richard Ford, 'Independence Day'.
GETTIN' BUSINESS-Y: Eating and Flirting on America's Next Top Financial News ChannelNew York, 29 October 2007.
She was a big, solid girl - haunchy, buttocky - lugging her heavy bag with ease.William Boyd, 'Armadillo'.
In the upper berth, the buttocky man was murmuring to his snickering bride.Paul Theroux, 'Riding the Iron Rooster'.
This flooring doesn't look very cabiny.Remark on the remodeling show 'Maine Cabin Masters'.
Very Cambridge-y (i.e. full of College anecdotes) but very readable.Alex Keller, 'The Infancy of Atomic Physics'.
On this spring afternoon, the 44-year-old CEO of San Diego-based biotech company Cytori Therapeutics pulls out his laptop, launches a PowerPoint presentation, and there they are: conical and cantaloupy, A's through D's, beige and pink and taupe and tan, more breasts than you might ever see in a women's locker room, never mind in the middle of a lunch table.Wired, November 2010.
My first question for you, before we get into all your career-y stuff: What was the moment when you went, "This is what I want to do"?Christina Applegate, interviewing Annie Murphy, 17 June 2021.
"In the multi-cam world, everyone's a little bit more cartoony," Murphy said.Alex Barasch, quoting Annie Murphy, The New Yorker, 14 June 2021.
The next morning the four of them scooped up the shells from the floor, enjoying the castenety clatter they made as they were tossed into trash bags.Hanya Yanagihara, 'A Little Life'.
There on the Playa, back in San Francisco with Lola, neckdeep in the whole catfighty activism scene (LGBT rights, antiwar, antiglobalization, ecofeminism, freecycling - Lola was freelance, she did them all), everything, life, all of it.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
"I feel all catherine-wheely. You know, like when one's a little drunk."Aldous Huxley, 'Brief Candles'.
"You just sound cute when you get all causey!"Spencer Tracey (Adam Bonner), to Katherine Hepburn (Amanda Bonner), in "Adam's Rib".
The room was full of steam, the cedary smell of his soap heavy in the damp air.Anne Packer, 'The Dive from Clausen's Pier'.
Trout feels the cellophany semicrumple of the cigarette pack in his hand.Christopher Sorrentino, 'Trance'.
"At first I thought this was going to be just another chainy kind of restaurant."Personal observation.
Exactly one year from tomorrow, former President Barack Obama. He packs up the teleprompters and the selfie-sticks, and the Greek columns, and all that hopey, changey stuff and he heads on back to Chicago.Sarah Palin.
"Your face is all cheekboney."Season 1, Episode 2, 'Orange is the New Black'.
There is, for instance, Jorge de Cervantes, a Colombian immigrant who, late in life, discovers in himself a genius for the complicated math and chessy maneuvering involved in the flawless running of a Manhattan parking garage.Jonathan Dee, The New Yorker, 07 May 2018.
"Eventually my turn came, and the words that I had written in silence, (an earplug-enhanced silence, as a matter of fact, that amplified the fleeting Chiclety contact of upper and lower incisors...)"Nicholson Baker, 'Reading Aloud'.
Ooh, those lovely roasted, buttery French chickens, they were so good and chickeny.Julia Child, Alex Prud'homme, 'My Life in France'.
He looked so benign and his cheeks were kind of chimpmunky and his eyes were so sparkly.Jane Smiley, 'Duplicate Keys'.
She had glossy black hair twisted back with lacquered chopstick-y things, and diamond studs the size of cocktail peanuts in her ears.Jennifer Weiner, 'Good in Bed'.
"The sanctuary is swimiming in permanent, churchy light and jam-packed with heads and flowered hats bowed in beseechment."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
"His hands were long and thin but not womanish. They reminded Wexford of saints's hands in what he called churchy paintings."Ruth Rendell, 'Sins of the Fathers'.
There was a smell to the place I hadn't noticed before, a sort of dry, cigary bite in the air.J Robert Lennon, 'The Funnies'.
Beside me, Pierce breathed his labored, cigarettey breaths.J Robert Lennon, "The Funnies".
The breath he chants into her face is sweet, putrid, cigarettey.Christopher Sorrentino, 'Trance'.
The high-profile copyright trial against Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant got a bit more circusy on Wednesday - day two of the proceedings - according to a report from Rolling Stone.Salon Magazine, 16 June 2016.
Disraeli, for example, saw cause for comment when at dinner he found him 'calm and not at all claret-y'.Robert Blake, 'Disraeli'.
Dionysius has his assistants pull a series of gowns from the closet, dithering as he tries to find the right match. "A bit clashy," he says, tossing one aside.The New York Times, 05 July 2008.
Damon Lindelof defends 'Game of Thrones': 'We live in a clickbait-y media culture that exists to pick things apart'Salon, 19 August 2015
It seems only fitting that ClickHole, the Onion spinoff that has expertly spoofed clickbaity articles for years, has turned its attention to hyperpartisan political news.Slate, 17 May 2017.
The new clickbait-y publishers that were only then emerging, like Business Insider, shamelessly copied the juiciest passages and wrote entire posts about them, drafting on our PR momentum.Antonio Garcia Martinez, 'Chaos Monkeys'.
But that's not why Amazon is paying your wireless bills, and that's not why it burdened the design with a tiny, clicky keyboard.The New York Times, 22 November 2007.
Sylvia turns to her mother-in-law. "Were they always like this, Mrs Hampton? So, so ... cliquey?"Penelope Lively, 'Moon Tiger'.
Sea stacks are wee tiny islands that tend to be cliffy, taller than they are wide and generally not joined to the land.Archaeology, November/December 2006.
"Nice. She was tall, on the slim side. A little clothes-horsey."Susan Isaacs, 'Any Place I Hang My Hat'.
Poor little coachy girl. She's so jealous cause everybody else is more comfortable than the coachy girl.Larry David, mocking a coach-class passenger in 'The Hero' episode of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'.
The economic boom has given us too many people with helicopters and too many crushed into cockroachy flats from hell, way too many loathing their lives in fluorescent cubicles, enduring for the weekend and then starting all over again, and we're fracturing under the weight of it.Tana French, 'The Likeness'.
"For years, we couldn't really interact with fans, but now with Twitter, it's like we can have a mini-Comic-Con every day," Weinstein told The A.V. Club. "And The Simpsons is the most Comic-Con-y show ever."Erik Adams, 20 December 2020, AV Club, Gizmodo.
"Accounting might take this opportunity to be complainy and say things like, 'Um, as we said before, can you guys, um, maybe complete the voiding process yourselves instead of just moving it to the accounts-refund folio because that kind of makes a mess for us, OK?'"Jacob Tomsky, 'Heads in Beds'.
"My head looks all computery and damn pixillated."Episode 8 of the HBO series 'East Bound and Down'.
"We lived mostly on that leftover, condimenty stuff, you know? Ketchups and jams. Chutney. And then, just every now and then, there'd be, oh, oatmeal or dried-up spaghetti or something."Sue Miller, 'While I Was Gone'.
There were a lot of condomy problems that I did not get a particularly good look at.John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars'.
They are the wings, I note, of a condor (the other condory bits having been disposed of) painted white, again not particularly skilfully.Tibor Fischer, 'The Collector Collector'.
We think of it ('R') as consonanty, but it's less consonanty than, say 'P'.John McWhorter, Lexicon Valley podcast 96.
Also, the contests seem so arbitrary, so flagrantly contest-y when the point of a really good book is that it can't be meaningfully compared to anything else - certainly not in a way that can be quantified.Laura Miller, Salon, 23 March 2010.
"Grayton Beach is not aristocratic, even though the prices have now reached a certain point. You don't shave and you don't wear socks. And there are no high-rises. It just has that old, cottagey charm to it."The New York Times, 06 June 2008.
When I was four my mother nicknamed me Clumsy, until my father apparently told her to stop because it was just country clubby enough to stick.Anna Quindlen, 'Rise and Shine'.
For the simple girl - that's Lauren here - high dudgeon about disloyalty is one (annoying) way to keep more coupley friends on the hook.The New York Times, 13 August 2007.
Earlier this month, a thread of cringey TikTok videos went viral on Twitter. In one video, a woman standing in front of a bathroom mirror does thumb movements to a Yo Gotti and Nicki Minaj song before panning up to reveal that she's filming by holding the phone in her mouth.Taylor Lorenz, Atlance, 25 October 2018.
20A: Supermodel Wek (ALEK) — I wish I had a handy way for you to remember this very crosswordesey name.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 18 December 2020.
"Sir, don't be so crowdy!"P. T. Bridgeport, in Walt Kelly's daily comic strip 'Pogo', 23 May 1952.
Yeah, hair first and then we were thinking, like, a Cruella de Vil-y look? It's quite horror-y, isn't it?Episode 1 of 'I Hate Suzie'.
The New Anti-ISIS Medal: A Bit Too Crusadery?Headline on the Atlantic online magazine, 31 March 2016.
I guess the thing that surprises me the most (and you may want to pursue the literature in and out of AA on this), is that the organization is markedly different from, say Synanon or one of those culty groups.
"Don't get cunty with me!"Paulie Walnuts to Christopher Multisanto, on 'The Sopranos'.
When a child has to go, its parents direct it toward the curb or, if they're indoors, to a spot they think of as curby.David Sedaris, 'Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls'
Mr Wiseman, who believes his art is in his editing, eschews that wanton, good-time cutty style, choosing instead to manipulate images like a traditional celluloid editorThe New York Times, 13 June 2007.
Aaron Copland's Rodeo is a classic of the American West. It's dancy, it's dusty.The DJ on a classical music radio station.
I could put her through the motions like a jointed puppet, all dancy in the limbs, loose, nothing to hold her up but me.Jane Hamilton, 'Disobedience'.
As the phone rang, I sat down on the grass, which was all overgrown and dandeliony.John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars'.
...she'd been having an affair with one of her publicity clients, a chef with the appallingly daytime-soapy name of Fernando...Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
"Now you get all decisivey?"Schitt's Creek.
Now, I'm a self-sufficient girl, and I do know the difference between alone and lonely, but I felt that I had been crossing into the barren, deserty landscape of the latter recently, and I really ought to take action.Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare, 'The Second Assistant'.
I had hoped the lawyers' office would be old and dark, with a Dickensy old lawyer; but it was just an ordinary office and we only saw a clerk, who was young, with very sleek hair.Dodie Smith, 'I Capture the Castle'.
"A thick diesely smell is in the air."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
Presiding over the mayhem were the serious Rowan and the doofusy Martin, full of bogus, often risque theories about life, which he appeared to hold with unwavering certainty.The Week, 06 June 2008.
The official trailer feels especially doom-and-gloomy (yes, even for this show), as the HBO epic approaches its long-awaited climax.Slate Magazine, 24 May 2017.
Jonathan Lethem: It was really one of the most doomy things to say to a kid. My grandmother would say, it doesn't matter what you think you are. When the Nazis come, you're a Jew.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
Has the Chelsea Hotel kicked out their douchey new management?
You can copy electronic books onto any downloady device you have.Overheard at the library.
"I want women to wear lime-green dresses with white embroidery this summer. But drapey, not all stiff."Anne Packer, 'The Dive from Clausen's Pier'.
"Beyond his knowledge, however, there were stirrings, intimations of nature and poetry and human weakness, which could never be confided either in him or in Mrs. K., who, in Eddie's phrase, in spite of her sterling qualities, seemed to them rather drawing-roomy."Penelope Fitzgerald, 'The Knox Brothers'.
Dad was bringing all the wine, boxes of it. They must be a fairly drinky crowd, we thought.Maeve Binchy, 'Whitethorn Woods'.
The girl's face was pretty and drunky as she butter-churned on the boy's lap.Lisa Taddeo, 'Grace'.
"We look carefully at the titles, we're not in the habit of trying to really ferret away little clues, but it's nice when things join up in the show," Jesse Armstrong said at the TV press tour on Wednesday. "We all have quite a detailed knowledge of this business in this world, and sometimes fragments fit together for people. But we're not a super Easter Eggy operation.Norman Weiss, quoting Jesse Armstrong, Primetimer, 9 September 2021.
Anyone have a pup with easty/westy feet, and did your pup grow out of it or is there something I can give them like calcium?
The elbowy gestures with which their leader flourishes his ceremonial sword are awkward and unconvincing, and so are those of the two bespectacled women waving leafy branches toward the four points of the compass.Alison Lurie, 'Foreign Affairs'.
Wei challenged this assertion and proceeded to draw the best elephant he could with various number of parameters. Here I show his results with 5, 10, 20 and 30 adjustable parameters. Not very elephanty elephants, even with 30 parameters.
"Cruising the elmy streets of insular Newfoundland in a devil's own fury?"Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
For example, say you take estimates of the set of words most likely to come after each four-word sequence, and use those estimates to grow a string, word by word, always looking at the four most recent words to determine the next one. The string will be eerily Englishy, but not English.Steven Pinker, 'The Language Instinct'.
The smell means nothing to me, not that one or cherry pipe tobacco or wet oilcloth or any of the other vaguely Englishy things with which our parents apparently tried to disguise themselves.Anna Quindlen, 'Rise and Shine'.
He was well cast in the Hobbit movies as the frosty, Eurotrash-y elven king Thranduil.New York Times, 22 August 2016.
The more we look at the Cambrian explosion, the less explosion-y it looks.Phoebe Cohen, Williams College paleontologist.
The others were downstairs in the lobby. They all looked gray and eyebaggy.Tana French, 'The Likeness'.
I enjoyed almost all of the time I spent watching it, and yet, when I look at that 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, I feel downright eye-roll-y: Only dictators and death are 100 percent.Willa Paskin, Slate magazine, December, 2015.
There are surely those who feel downright eye-rolly about any controversy involving Dunham or her show at this point, but "American Bitch" stokes opinions with undeniable artistry: Girls has still got it.Willa Paskin, Slate magazine, 24 February 2017.
Miss Sarah said it also helped that he didn't act all fake-chirpy with them.Anne Tyler, 'Noah's Compass'.
Last chance we'll have before it becomes really farm-y.A character on a road trip in the movie "I'm thinking of ending things".
Even fashion-y swimsuits are lame and poorly rendered.The New York Times, 22 May 2008.
But Kate was pitch perfect. Nothing too insanely fashiony or arch.Slate Magazine, 29 April 2011.
It smelled of vegetables and hair spray and the unmistakable odor that permeates places in which there are late-sleepers - the smell of bedclothes and bodies and feety aromas.Paul Theroux, 'Riding the Iron Rooster'.
Walking inside was like joining a convention of slightly fetishy people who roamed around touching the books and saying "Isn't this wonderful!", as if they had dropped in from Mars.Emma Brockes, The Guardian, 14 December 2018.
There are many solid objections to the argument by design, and there are also two billion billion fighty books on the topic of 'you should totally be a cool atheist like me'.Jordan Ellenberg, 'How Not to be Wrong'
The last place, the Palace, was a bit film starry; not really you if you know what I mean.Dirk Bogarde, 'Snake and Ladders'.
Something behind him caught her eye. A gesture. A particular, fisty way of pushing glasses up the nose.Claire Messud, 'The Emperor's Children'.
"Put a bulky letter-sweater on either of them, a flippy pleated skirt and bobby sox, and my heart would swell for them."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
Addressing the congregation without notes, Jane Henson was at once grounded and a bit floaty, her remarks vaguely spiritual but not in a traditional sense.Michael Davis, 'Street Gang'.
I'm sure I could get a grant from the GLC, or do you think it's a bit too folk-arty for them?Margaret Drabble, 'The Radiant Way'.
With the exception of "Wildest Dream" - slightly modern rock, slightly Foo-Fightery - "Revelation" operates with its own kind of Schillinger System, an almost clinical set of chord modulations, solo lengths and emotional progressions.The New York Times, 02 June 2008.
I keep up with this stuff, so I’m used to seeing forehead-slappy moments, denial so abrupt and profound it's hard to imagine the promulgator lives on the same planet the rest of us do.Phil Plait, Slate Magazine, 25 February 2014.
"How should we think of conspiracy theorists? They're often dismissed as fringey nuts, but an awful lot of Americans believe in one conspiracy or another."Salon, 24 April 2013.
"So they had their lost weekend together, drinking quarts of liquor and doing every wild fucky thing that you can imagine two manic-depressive poets might do."Nicholson Baker, 'The Anthologist'.
With its honey-washed limestone facades and glittering sea views, Malta is as Game of Thronesy as it gets.The Ultimate Game of Thrones Guide to Malta.
"Everybody looks so Gappy and identical."Douglas Coupland, 'Microserfs'.
The idea of dinner with Guido and Holly appalled Misty.Laurie Colwin, 'Happy All the Time'.
"I will not sit around making nervous small talk over some garbagy rack of lamb," she said.
The comedy god has had a string of duds, from the gay panic-y "Get Hard" to "Daddy's Home 2" with Mel Gibson.Nick Shager, 'What the Hell Happened to Will Ferrell?', The Daily Beast, 24 June 2020.
"Ethan Hawke was the hottest Gen-X-y kind of guy."From some 'who was hot' show on VH1.
"That is, it's a super duper Gen-X'y puzzle."Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 03 June 2022.
Gilt-y: golden Trump statue pops up at rightwing CPAC summitHeadline, The Guardian, 26 February 2021.
But unfortunately French feminists don't tend to write in an American girlfriend-y kind of tone, so I just gave her a loose summary instead.Hanna Rosin, Slate, 24 April 2012.
Rewatching the VMAs and it just makes me realize how awesome female musicians are, especially this year and I'm feeling very girl power-y.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
"And yet, despite this sort of easy Glenn-Gouldy contempt in my background, there I was physically in Edinburgh, under that tent, among strangers, finishing up my own first reading..."Nicholson Baker, 'Reading Aloud'.
TRUMP'S WEIRD, GLOATY VIDEO ABOUT A POLITICAL PRISONER: A SCENE-BY-SCENE ANALYSISVOX online magazine, 21 April 2017.
Her son, Chicky, part-time grease monkey turned felon, couldn't even manage to get incarcerated at one of those nice, golf-course-y federal prisons where the better class of offenders go.Susan Isaacs, 'Any Place I Hang My Hat'.
Goliaths get bigger and more Goliath-y while Davids shrink and wither.David Engber, Slate Magazine, 07 October 2013.
Content ID is a typically Googly way to solve these disputes - it replaces human judgment with powerful algorithms.Farhad Manjoo, Slate Magazine, 27 April 2010.
It has to be said that Elaine can be just a mite governessy.Penelope Lively, 'The Photograph'.
Marjorie's been frightfully governessy about the whole thing.Evelyn Waugh, 'A Handful of Dust'.
Before surgery, Charlotte's complaint was that her breasts looked grandma-y.Doctor Terry Dubrow, on the plastic surgery show 'Botched'.
Proust's grandmothery passage about the metaphors effaced by the usure of the modern tongue recalls Joyce's lovely "She hated the effacement to which English usage reduced the widowed mother..." from Chapter 5.Nicholson Baker, 'Essays and Other Lumber'.
One of the sturdy cliches of contemporary brand-building is the importance of avoiding an image that's too "crunchy" or, worse, too "granola-y".The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 28 January 2007.
I can't tell you how groany that is - worse, it's just ... arbitrary and weird.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 08 October 2022.
You're not groomy, she's not bridey.Larry David, arguing with a lesbian couple, 'Curb Your Enthusiasm', Season 9, Episode 1.
While the bleached, grope-y men of Fox News drop like flies, fending off lawsuit after lawsuit for sexual harassment, Wolcott observes that "the fake-news pollutants and beefcake posturing of Trumpdom" have met their match in the form of a powerful cadre of female journalists spanning three generations.Vanity Fair, October 2017.
If you are interested in powerful females or growthy bulls that will produce great replacements, surf your way through our site to find out why Green Mountain Red Angus has ideal genetics for today's industry.
Her voice was gulpy and doughy.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
We're hurtling toward that thing right now and it's got an eerie, Halloweeny, greenish cast to it.Shari Caudron, 'Who Are You People?'.
The kids want a quick clean hamburgery place with Formica tables and clear neutral windows giving on the stream of traffic that ties them securely to the future.John Updike, 'How to love America and leave it at the same time'.
"I can feel handsomey. That feels handsomey."Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, playing a blind woman on 'Arrested Development'.
"He wanted to go further than I did, and that made me uncomfortable, and I realized that that's not the kind of person that I wanted to be around," she says. "I don't think that's necessarily being a terrorist. I think that's just called being a hands-y teenaged boy."
He eventually filed what the online law blog Above the Law called "one of the weakest opposition motions I've seen" - in addition to being "hand-wavey and misleading."Elura Nanos, 'Law and Crime', 10 March 2021.
She was a big, solid girl - haunchy, buttocky - lugging her heavy bag with ease.William Boyd, 'Armadillo'.
Shelley, in 1821, in his Defence of Poetry (published in 1840), gave it a haremy flavor.Nicholson Baker, 'Essays and Other Lumber'.
In Newport Court, under the headmistressy yet motherly eye of the white-coated lady in charge, limited browsing had been the rule, half-a-crown's worth of purchase per five or six minutes.Kingsley Amis, 'Jake's Thing'.
She spoke in a hearty headmistressy shout.Paul Theroux, 'The London Embassy'.
"Pink," Edward said in satisfaction, peering at the filling in his biscuit.Joanna Trollope, 'The Men and the Girls'.
"Sorry," Kate said, "not very health foody -"
A month or so ago, I noticed a giant billboard near my apartment advertising Diet Coke Plus. Because I live in a hipstery part of Brooklyn, I almost mistook it for an art installation.Elizabeth Spiers, 'Fast Company', February 2008.
"His heart was too golden and hog-washy for that."Aldous Huxley, 'Brief Candles'.
"I figured I should look the part."Chris Bohjalian, 'Midwives'.
"The part?" I asked.
"You know, a home birthy sort. Peace, love, tie-dye. Alernative medicine."
Stevie: "Is he like, really..."From the TV show 'Schitt's Creek', Season 3, Episode 10.
David: "Really handsome in a homeless-y way sort of way? Yes."
This they gave him, and you could see the three of them drinking in the hookery glories of Lola Thong.Tom Wolfe, 'Ambush at Fort Bragg'.
It starts with the audacious, hooky premise of a young boy who sues his parents for having him, and over the course of its two hours, it makes its case relentlessly, devastatingly, and uncompromisingly.Emily Yoshida, Vulture, 12 December 2018
Exactly one year from tomorrow, former President Barack Obama. He packs up the teleprompters and the selfie-sticks, and the Greek columns, and all that hopey, changey stuff and he heads on back to Chicago.Sarah Palin.
Indeed, to Bolton's fans in MAGA-land, his aggressive disdain for hopey-changey thinking is a revelation.Vanity Fair, 05 April 2018.
Forget about I.P.A.'s, strong, hoppy brews developed by the British centuries ago to withstand the ocean voyage to colonial India.The New York Times, 09 January 2008.
Yeah, hair first and then we were thinking, like, a Cruella de Vil-y look? It's quite horror-y, isn't it?Episode 1 of 'I Hate Suzie'.
Clearly she'd heard from Murray, some garbled version of his learning program - she seemed to think he was under the impression that he could teach himself the sciences, chemistry and the like - and she asked him, in that hostessy way of hers, at once gentle and persistent, even probing, like Stella Woods, his childhood dentist, with her soft voice, her tongue depressor, and inescapable, ruthless, tiny pick.Claire Messud, 'The Emperor's Children'.
Celia Hooper appeared with a plate of sandwiches, flagged 'cucumber', smiling too, but in a hostessy way.Joanna Trollope, 'The Rector's Wife'.
Her crushed-silk dress was cinched tightly at the waist and made her figure look very hourglassy.Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 'Americanah'.
I want her childhood to be Huck Finn-y, you know.The character Burt Farlander, prospective father, in the movie "Away We Go".
As anyone could have predicted, most of the group went rushing to the Heart corner, crowding together in a warm and huggy mass.Jonathan Franzen, 'The Discomfort Zone'.
Commencement addresses are TED Talks, all humblebraggy and eager to go viral.Salon Magazine headline, 05 May 2014.
In the hummy almost-silence that followed he shook off the garbage bag and reached his hand around to rub what would clearly be a major bruise on his back, whimpering.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
He didn't want a log of short stories full of literary striving, vessel-popping, hungry-breasty suffering, Freudian sex-mushed swooning.Tom Wolfe, 'Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker'.
They were in the wild aeons after dogs had already made themselves right at home among men, because I suppose dogs had more of a function in a hunter-gathery kind of culture like they liked then.Christopher Sorrentino, 'Trance'.
Ken Sunshine, the head of a P.R. firm in Manhattan, said he thought the media had an institutional bias against hype-y terms like "world renowned" and "once in a lifetime", which he studiously avoids putting in his news releases.The New York TImes, 30 June 2008.
"Isn't it hubris to blend your pool with the ocean?", I said, "Icarus-y?"Melissa Bank, 'The Wonder Spot'.
I resisted that for a very good reason. I though it would look a bit in-jokey or desperate.Ricky Gervais, interviewed in Time Magazine, 17 December 2007.
But this show is so obscure and insidery, that the only people likely to tune in are viewers familiar with the vocabulary and conventions of this sci-fi microgenre.Virgnina Heffernan, review of "The Amazing Screw-On Head" in the New York Times, 27 July 2006.
The other reason is that the show has always felt a bit insider-y in its humor.Matt Seitz, Salon Magazine, 23 June 2011.
The move, relying on Facebook posts, tweets and explainer videos, is a shift from the group's more typically insidery strategy of lobbying Hill staffers or members of Congress.Steven Overly, Nancy Scola, Politico, 30 May 2020.
Voters toward the bottom of the graph tended to answer 'don't know' to more insidery questions.Jordan Ellenberg, 'How Not to be Wrong'
Take out the stuff about immigration, because I feel it's a little too issue-y.Serena Meyers, on 'Veep', Season 7, Episode 1.
The bank gave us this list in an envelope protected by a wax seal - privacy law prevented us from seeing the names - and we in turn met with the head of a British national security unit to hand him the envelope. It was all very James Bond-y.Steven Levitt, Stephen Dubner, 'Think Like a Freak'.
As Dad often says, I'm a 'lucky girl' - by which he means I have a good 'temperament'. By this Jane Austeny word, he means that I am 'naturally at home in the world' while some people are 'all across it'.Sebastian Faulks, 'Engleby'.
With her jargony commentary on society, Millner often seems to be building defenses against getting too personal, being too clear.The New York Times Book Review, 25 February 2007.
She is behing him, in a large white men's shirt, the bug light staining her a jaundicey yellow.A M Homes, 'Music for Torching'.
Finesse's protruding jaundice-y eyes and expansive forehead lean forward at me now as significant signifiers.Richard Ford, 'I'm Here', in 'Let Me Be Frank With You'.
I am very je ne regrette rien-y about it.Soshanna, in the HBO series 'Girls'.
This morning I was thinking that my hairdresser is getting so Jesus-y with me.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
In an outfit by one of those magisterial designers who escort jet-setty woman.Susan Isaacs, 'Any Place I Hang My Hat'.
So they’re thinking of having Rich Lowry or Bill Kristol onstage to ensure no questions cause any sort of debate or friction within the party. Sounds journalism-y to me ... does it sound journalism-y to you?Jim Newell, Salon Magazine, 12 May 2014.
Laura Prepon plays Chelsea, and Handler plays her older judgey, super-Christian sister Sloane.USA Today, 11 January 2012.
It's simple to cluck about invasions of privacy - and a lot more difficult to accept that honoring those principles would mean actually giving up something that's guilty, judgey fun.Slate magazine, 22 August 2012
NAPTIMES has a scheduled, kindergarteny vibe.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 30 September 2022.
"The fellow has thick, black eyebrows, a complicated but strict system of dark hair waves, narrow eyeslits and a knifey smile set in the pouting, mocking angle of swarthy self-congratulation."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
Oh: "That's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."The movie 'Year One' with Jack Black and Michael Cera.
Zed: "It's got sort of a knowledge-y taste."
"I'm sorry that you feel I've been leadery."On the show 'Orange is the New Black', Season 2, Episode 11.
"Tell me more about that bizarre landy world you come from. Is there water there, too?"Umbriel to Fry, in the 'Lost World of Atlanta' episode of 'Futurama'.
Upstairs, promo girls dressed in leprechauny cocktail waitress outfits prepared to hand out 'Get lucky' key chains and green beads.
"Bombadil?" says Jonah. "Not the Green Man leprechauny one from The Lord of the Rings? What a bizarre alias."David Mitchell, 'Slade House'.
"Goodbye Tour" doesn't give us many details about the job - it's at some kind of higher-ed campus in upstate New York. It feels small and liberal artsy, although it could be a SUNY or a community college.Slate magazine, 17 April 2017.
Remy: You gotta taste this! This is... oh, it's got this kind of... mmm, it's burny, it's melty... it's not really a smoky taste. It's kind of like a certain... Pshah! It's got like this "Ba-boom! Zap!" kind of taste. Dont you think? What would you call that flavor?The Pixar/Disney movie 'Ratatouille'.
Emile: Lightning-y?
Remy: Yeah! It's lightning-y!
"I describe it as a links course through the air," Graeme McDowell said Wednesday. "When it blows here, the wind is a massive factor, you know, strength and direction, but it certainly does not play linksy along the ground."The Wall Street Journal, 09 August 2012.
A rubber duck is in effect a happy face with a body and lips - which is what the beak of the rubber duck has become: great, lipsticky, bee-stung lips.Donovan Hohn, Harper's Magazine, January 2007.
Her eyes were green in her thin white face; her lips were overlarge and lispy-looking; her short hair jet black; and you could see the rise of her nipples through her raincoat.Paul Theroux, 'The London Embassy'.
But by integrating interviews and personal observations with facts and figures, they avoided much of the tedium of fifty chapters of listy prose constrained by a standard outline.Mark Monmonier, 'Cartogragphies of Danger'.
Japan's chewed-looking coastline and angular islands give it a look like no other country on earth, and its lizardy and nibbled shape, more like a set of carvings than a pattern of islands, suggests its cultural complexity.Paul Theroux, 'Ghost Train to the Eastern Star'.
Although they had plenty of money, he took to wearing slightly grungy, often loud sport shirts and mismatched shorts or bathing suits, and white loafery types of shoes, dirty canvas boaters, or worn-down flip-flops.Cynthia Kaplan, 'Why I'm Like This'.
"I choose my words carefully, not wanting things to get locker-roomy."David Gilmour, 'The Film Club'.
Doors and windows were open, the maid was drawing up the sunblinds, a cool breeze was blowing in from the Park, smelling of dry grass and petrol - a most exciting, Londony smell which mixed with a glorious smell of the dinner cooking.Dodie Smith, 'I Capture the Castle'.
He put a hand out to take Judy's, but both hers were deep in her coat pockets, her long, black, Londony coat which proclaimed, as did all her clothes, how far she had deliberately come from the land on which she grew up.Joanna Trollope, 'Next of Kin'.
Luckily, I survived that evening unscathed, so no one will ever find out about that losery Jimmy Carter keychain.Sarah Vowell, 'Assassination Vacation'.
I'd sing along to the lounge-music-y theme song of the first show, before shouting and pointing, "Look, boss. Zee plane! See plane!" along with Herve Villachaize during the opening sequence of the second.Susan Gilman, 'Hypocrite in a Pouffey White Dress'.
"I've got this new act. It's this loungey thing."Ron Fair, head of Geffen Records, describing his pitch for the Pussycat Dolls.
But between watching my clock and wondering whether Jennifer would have hurled herself histrionically into the back of her car and left already and also watching my cell phone to see whether Scott had called and following Jose's directions, which were taking me through many a luxe-y neighborhood, I didn't have much time to appreciate the fact that I was about to set foot for the first time on the hallowed earth of a legendary Hollywood studio.Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare, 'The Second Assistant'.
Oh, Malcolm Stewart. Malcolm Stewart. With your Macbeth-y first name and your Macbeth-ier last name. You did not just say the government might engage in a teensy little bit of judicious, narrowly tailored book-banning, did you?Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Magazine, 24 March 2009.
For many veteran readers of the Times, these magaziney table-of-contents pages fit like a loose suit and read like a celebration of white space.Slate, 01 April 2008.
I would if I was a beardy weirdy magiciany man.The IT Crowd, Season 3, Episode 2.
First, an obvious point that is newly relevant after this interview: For all of Trump's denunciation of the "failing" and "fake news" mainstream press, he clearly craves attention and approval from the most mainstream-y of the established media.Atlantic magazine online, 20 July 2017.
As anyone could have predicted, this new friendship soon becomes what Jules would call making-outy, as she and Paul put down their plants and retire to his boudoir.Anthony Lake, The New Yorker, 12/19 July 2010.
"I went over to his unfurnished mansiony place in Woodside," she recalled, "and I found him huddled in the kitchen with his five colleagues and a few reporters hanging outside on the lawn."Walter Isaacson, 'Steve Jobs'.
"Look, this is just a long-overdue reunion between old friends with a couple of totally frickin' friend weirdoes."Screenplay for 'The Invitation'.
"They're a little Mansony".
The GOP front-runner invents a less marriage-y phrase for "civil unions".Salon magazine, 11 October 2011.
Alexander Payne's 'The Descendants' is disappointingly sweet and marshmallowy.Slate Magazine, 17 November 2011.
From Susan to all of us: HANDMADE Martha-Stewart-y gift baskets, which made us all feel cheap.Douglas Coupland, 'Microserfs'.
"The two women we happened to be sharing with made no attempt to conceal their disdain. 'That's brave!' said one. The other agreed: 'It's kinda matchy, doncha think?"Toby Young, 'How to Lose Friends and Alienate People'.
Airlines have tried a variety of tricks to hasten boarding, and Steffen isn’t the first mathy person to offer a promising solution.Nick Stockton, Slate Magazine, 06 November 2014.
Those clear pastel colors, Matisse-y almost, peach and lime green and powder blue.John Updike, 'Seek My Face'.
The only MATLABy thing about rhs.m is the very last command, the highly useful hist.Paul Nahin, 'Digital Dice'.
Axl Rose and Kanye West have a surprising amount in common. They both see themselves as arch-individualists in a pop world of industry-reared sheep. Just how mavericky are these guys?Salon Magazine, 29 November 2008.
We may think that the new, more "visionary", more megatrendy definition embraces the old, but in fact it doesn't.Nicholson Baker, 'Essays and Other Lumber'.
Mr Kressley in his coral cashmere cable-knit is like a cheerful, menschy, cartoon character that might have sprung from the pages of "Our Bodies, Ourselves," had it been willing to have a good time.The New York Times, 04 January 2008.
He has since evolved from all-American boy next door to menschy goofball in a series of roles that have bolstered his guy's-guy credentials.The New York Times, 12 March 2009.
Every page contains at least one rollicking anecdote, astute observation, or nugget of menschy wisdom.Slate Magazine, 14 April 2011.
It's not fun, exactly but it has a menschy, working-stiff sense of humor.New York Times, 08 September 2017.
..."I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Mind", her [Joan Didion's] withering assessment of Hollywood's fatal penchant for message-y films.The Atlantic, March 2006.
Something methody: people will tell you they do not teach method acting, but be careful; there are many different branches of method acting out there.
"And he wouldn't talk to me. You know, in his Methody way, he'd just kind of sit there and he'd go 'Yeah'."Jodie Foster, remembering working with Robert De Niro, in Rachel Abramowitz's 'Is that a Gun in Your Pocket?'
In one year in Facebook Ads, I had seen the famously micromanage-y founder and CEO in the Ads area precisely once: when he was walking around the building in a circle to get in his ten thousand daily steps.Antonio Garcia Martinez, 'Chaos Monkeys'.
Day of coding. It felt really Microsofty for some reason.Douglas Coupland, 'Microserfs'.
I did the totally middle-schooly thing wherein I put my hand on the couch about halfway between us to let him know that it was okay to hold it, but he didn't try.John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars'.
Tasteful and tame, the miniseries, true to its MILF-y title, is I Love Dick’s buttoned-up suburban sister.Inkoo Kang, review of 'Mrs. Fletcher', Slate, 25 October 2019.
At the same time, Streep flirts with her architect, played all milquetoasty by Steve Martin.The New Yorker, 04 January 2010.
After the uxorious but milquetoasty Sir William discovers his wife has been having an affair with a younger man, the suave Royal Air Force pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), Hester shocks everyone by leaving her husband and moving into a squalid walkup flat, where she lives by erself, (badly) kept by Freddie as an on-again, off-again mistress.Slate Magazine, 28 September 2012.
Nutting co-created the show with Patrick Somerville, who made the mind-bendy 2018 Netflix series 'Maniac', which follows an experimental pharmaceutical trial.Doreen St Felix, The New Yorker, 10 May 2021.
"Do I look too monstery in this dress?"Leela, the one-eyed alien, in the animated movie 'Futurama: Bender's Big Score'
"She gets such a morgue audience. They're so morgue-y."Bob Dylan, quoted by David Hajdu in 'Positively 4th Street'.
"Siphon coffee is very delicate," he said. "It's sweeter and juicier, and the flavors change as the temperature changes. Sometimes it has a texture so light it's almost moussey."The New York Times, 23 January 2008.
"The story is narrated in the first person by a character who looks, in McKean's illustrations, exactly as Gaiman did at the time: mullety dark hair, black T-shirt, cigarette streaming smoke up toward his face, dark aviator glasses on indoors."The New Yorker, 25 January 2010.
The parlor was a little bit bigger than a big wardrobe and stuffed with museumy stuff.David Mitchell, 'Black Swan Green'.
Christopher swung back onto the barstool beside him, trailing a muskratty odor freshly purchased from the coin-op cologne dispenser in the bathroom.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
...the event that led to the pointless foofaraw was NPR's long-overdue dismissal of official Fox Liberal Juan Williams, who explained that he was scared of "Muslims" in their Muslimy clothes, and then refused to actually apologize when told that that offended his Muslim co-workers at NPR.Alex Pareene, Salon, 18 November 2010.
The neighborhoods get a lot less name-y in that part of Brooklyn.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
What is it with the NYT and its name-droppy intellectualism fetish?Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 01 September 2018.
It could have been navel-gazey and awful, given that author Edward St. Aubyn seems intimately acquainted with the real world of British literary prizes.A blurb in Slate magazine for 'Lost for Words'.
I try to be careful not to inflict my neat-freaky to-do-list nature on him.Gillian Flynn, 'Gone Girl'.
"Also I'm planning this neighborhoody, kind of dining and retail area in the central square."The movie 'I Love You, Man'.
Feeling nesty, I went to Le Bazar de l'Hotel de Ville, known as "le BHV", an enormous market filled with aisle upon aisle of cheaply made merchandise.Julia Child, Alex Prud'homme, 'My Life in France'.
Peter Dreier's post is almost a parody of netrootsy Obamanoia - if you're going to ask voters to tolerate Obama associating with Ayers, don't trash Blumenthal for daring to read Fred Siegel.
CNet's CFO and largest shareholder was a pleasant-looking young man, affable, forthcoming, networky - and ready, I thought, to make a deal.Michael Wolff, 'Burn Rate'.
The problem was that the mathematics he had developed was only good for looking at one technology at a time. What he really needed was a networky kind of model like the ones Kauffman had developed.Mitchell Waldrop, 'Complexity'.
"No, I think I've just felt a sense of our connection. Our connectedness, to get New Agey about it."Sue Miller, 'While I was Gone'
Sure she was gorgeous, but she was idiotically tall, which made him look a prat, and she could be appallingly earnest and New Agey and she dressed in a kind of fake butch way which he couldn't stand.Joanna Trollope, 'Brother and Sister'.
Though the turnpike that ran through it was punctuated by carpet-remnant outlets and tire wholesalers, and even an unsettling, windowless store no one had ever been to, advertising "DVDs and Chinese Specialty Items", Main Street was quaint and New Englandy, with a cosmopolitan slant.Meg Wolitzer, 'The Uncoupling'.
I found it bewildering, if very New York Timesy, that the text of the article didn't break down the murderers and victims by race.
He, like Marina, had a public way about him, a type of jokiness that seemed very New Yorky to Bootie, jaded and a little off-putting;Claire Messud, 'The Emperor's Children'.
"Is she - I don't know how to say this - is she New Yorky?"Gillian Flynn, 'Gone Girl'.
"There's nothing more New Yorky than this, he said. Everyone sends lots of threats, stomps their feet, but in the end, we come to an agreement."Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 02 March 2020.
The news-grabby allure of atmospheric conditions, like fires and traffic tie-ups, is nothing new.Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon.com, 10 February 2010.
It's about as nichey as a niche film can get; I'm impressed that Lorber Films is actually giving it a one-week New York theatrical run on the way to home video.Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com, 31 May 2011.
How Peak TV Brought Us the Weird, Nichey Brilliance of Documentary NowHeadline in Slate, 28 September 2016.
Last for me that day was the premiere screening of The Mountain by Rick Alverson, whose Neil Hamburger-starring The Entertainment was a nichey Sundance hit a few years ago.Emily Yoshida, Vulture, 31 August 2018.
"I don’t know about 'keeping his pad level down' and 'getting fit' and all these key little nichey phrases that the football coaches use to talk about what linemen do," she says. "All I can tell is if Michael's lying on top of somebody. And if he's spread-eagled on top of somebody, that's good."Michael Lewis, 'The Blind Side'.
I've asked about this on other forums and most people were not fans of nick-namey names! Most found Teddy to be TOO cutesy. What do you think?A query on the website 'NameBerry: Baby Names, Only Cooler'.
And Shosh has ditched weird, malformed Ray in favor of a well-dressed guy in a decidedly non-Brooklyn-y bar.Slate, 18 March 2013.
Mom seemed unconcerned, but I was imagining all kinds of Amsterdam trip-ruining fates (arrest, injury, mental breakdown) and I felt like there was something noncancery wrong with my chest as the minutes ticked away.John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars'.
"What time is she getting here?" Cass asked. I was standing right behind her. She smelled of wine and tobacco and bath oil, and, faintly, too, of perspiration, a salty odor.Sue Miller, 'While I was Gone'.
"Noony, she thought," I answered.
"'Noony'?!" Sadie cried. She and Cass looked at each other and grinned. "'Noony,'" Sadie repeated. "She said, 'Noony'!"
"What's so funny about that?"
"It's the kind of thing you're always saying, Mom."
"With the arrival of Ohlmeyer and then NBC doing so well, the basic personality of the network became more aggressive and confident and notey."James Downey, producer and writer for Saturday Night Live.
"We caught the NSF doing something NSF-y, namely removing all objective measures from the definition of success for a program."Personal observation.
"A word about glottal shock. It's not a big thing. OK, it's a nuisance-y bit of tension in the throat, so what?."G Robert Jacks, 'Getting the Word Across'.
You can start out on that topic, but I assume that later you'll want to do something more numerical analysisy.Personal observation.
"Whatever the reason, I'm always happy when I am invited to spend the night or just an hour waiting in the pristine and nursey neatness of Vicki's little 1-BR condo, on which her dad holds the note, and which the two of them furnished in a one-day whirlwind trip to the Miracle Furniture Mile in Paramus."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
My mother called him 'Punch', but that suggests an exaggeration of feature he did not possess; his nose and chin were both strong but there was nothing nut-crackery about them.Joseph Ackerley, 'My Father and Myself'.
Because not only did I not have the mental commitment to hike, I also lacked both the oatmealy socks and the cardiovascular equipment.Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare, 'The Second Assistant'.
There are at least two instances where Hicks recounted for investigators - with no corroborating accounts from anyone else - how hard she worked to get Trump to stop saying obstruction-y things to the press.Christina Cauterucci, Slate, 20 April 2019.
But then! On Wednesday afternoon, Spicer conducted his off-camera press conference. And the press secretary seemed to deny the Occam-y explanation of "covfefe."Atlantic online, 30 May 2017.
"I like your house. It's very old persony".Buck to Chuck, in the movie 'Chuck and Buck'.
As I suggested around this time last year, that widening gulf between the Oscar electorate and the moviegoing public may help to explain the academy's recent predilection for middlebrow, mid-budget, Oscar-y films that are neither big hits nor memorable artistic breakthroughs.Salon, 23 February 2013.
Miles Teller Gets Oscar-Baity as Boxing Legend Vinny Pazienza in the Trailer for Bleed For This.Slate, 29 June 2016.
For all its aggressive energy, The Current War is an uninvolving bore, making it unlikely to measure up as the kind of Oscar-baity prestige entry The Weinstein Co. obviously had in mind."David Rooney, in The Hollywood Reporter.
Fisher has been visiting the Mogollon canyons at every opportunity, for work and for play, documenting their otherworldy forms in thousands of photographs.John Krakauer, 'Eiger Dreams'.
"You feel like you're on a virgin planet, like the planets they visit in Star Trek. It feels really outposty."Douglas Coupland, 'Microserfs'.
"I am not so over-share-y like you."The movie 'Tiny Furniture'.
In three pacy parts, we've had the death of Watson's wife Mary, memorable villains in Vivian Norbury (Marcia Warren) and Culverton Smith (Toby Jones), plus drugs, dogs, babies, disguises, the shooting of Watson (with a tranquilizer dart, it turned out) and countless canonical references.Michael Hogan, The Daily Telegraph, 16 January 2017.
There was a purple, pamphlety thing entitled "Ritualized Homosexuality: Three Field Studies".Jeffrey Eugenides, 'Middlesex'.
In emphasizing the sex part with lazy jokes about walks of shame and nude parties, it made the 10-episode series seem cringingly pander-y, like that "How do you do, fellow kids" meme but in college instead.Tomi Obaro, Buzzfeed News, 17 December 2021.
They want to be able to position a book so it can compete to its best advantage against what are frankly some really schlocky titles that have come out, paperbacky supermarket rack kind of junk.Christopher Sorrentino, 'Trance'.
Her skin showed the parchmenty texture and piebald spottiness of a blond sixty-three-year-old sun worshipper.Jay McInerney, 'The Good Life'
"Frank shaves his own head. Doesn't do a very good job."Linda Greenlaw, 'The Lobster Chronicles'.
"I guess not. Kind of patch-worky, like he got interrupted and didn't quite finish."
"The air suddenly smells sweet and peanutty."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
In due course a baby Bootle appeared, which Lily carried in a rather self-consciously peasanty manner on her hip.Tony Hendra, 'Father Joe'.
And then, after Baumgarten has asked the waitress - new to our restaurant, and whose aging, peasanty overflow he had decided he must get to know - whether she can recommend someone to give him Hungarian lessons; after he has taken her name and number - "Live alone, there, do you, Eva?" - he excuses himself and goes to the back of the restaurant, where there is a pay phone.Philip Roth, 'The Professor of Desire.'
My father's general enthusiasm was almost always with him, so I thought, like a cloud circling him, like bees buzzing around a large petally flower.Jane Hamilton, 'Disobedience'.
"Mum, for Christ's sake!" said Catherine. "He had AIDS!" - with a phlegmy catch in her voice, which her anger fought with.Alan Hollinghurst, 'The Line of Beauty'.
OK, so I'm not going to keep trying to have this picket-fence-y life.
Gibbs: To what? To nine pieces of whatever we happen to have in our pockets at the time? Oh, yes. That sounds very piratey.'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End'.
There were no lemons, so I made do with a little squirt of plasticky juice from the Jif lemon in the fridge.Chris Cleave, 'Little Bee'.
He's all police business-y now, as if some training session he's sat through has flashed into his thick head.Richard Ford, 'I'm Here', in 'Let Me Be Frank With You'.
It was especially ... police-y today, appearing as it does right next to MIRANDA RIGHTS.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 29 October 2022.
And the names ... they seemed aggressively pop culture-y as I was solving, but looking over the grid, I don't think that's terribly accurate.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 02 April 2021.
Her parents, formerly amusing figures in a story, became oppressively real in sight of the wide, brown, porchy house.Sinclair Lewis, 'Arrowsmith'.
He indicated the block of wood on Mortenson's right. Its surface was violated by dark knots and curlicues of grease. Porcupiney splinters stood out on either end.Greg Mortenson, David Relin, "Three Cups of Tea".
The Chinese menu was about as porky as it could be.Paul Theroux, 'Riding the Iron Rooster'.
"You were all postpartumy and afterbirthy and shit."'Eastbound and Down', Season 3.
The lane was unpaved and potholey.Tana French, 'The Likeness'.
I concentrated on the pale blue of the sky as she felt my breasts and shook her had sadly. "They're pregnanty," she announced.Kathleen Tessaro, 'Elegance'.
Whether good or bad, War Horse and We Bought a Zoo and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy all have a prestige-y sameness to them.Slate magazine, 08 December 2011.
Its blend of satire and sweetness, princessy romance and feminist pluck was expertly calculated to satisfy a third grade girl.The New York Times, 11 January 2008.
What bummed me out wasn't so much that I don't drink the stuff (who cares?) but that it feels so product-placement-y to put a brand like this at 1-Across.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 24 July 2018.
Some forms of proof were more proovy than others.David Quammen, 'The Tangled Tree'.
"Good for Frances," Juliet had said to William on the telephone, listening to the pubby chink of glasses and rumble of talk behind him.Joanna Trollope, 'A Spanish Lover'.
While your pubes and beard may look identical, there are things you CAN do in order to make your beard look less ... pubey (for lack of a better term).https://www.toolsofmen.com/beard-looks-like-pubes/
In the flesh she had both bloom and vital force, but in two dimensions she looked puddingy.C P Snow, 'The Sleep of Reason'.
Now I looked at her puddingy face, or maybe it wasn't pudding, it was a failed pineapple upside-down cake.Mary Gordon, 'Spending'.
Mr Castle's puppety head popped over the garden fence.David Mitchell, 'Black Swan Green'.
Lots of trivia in this one, more than a few answers out of my wheelhouse, and then just an overall tricksy, question-marky vibe.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 03 September 2021.
"The older man and the young woman in slacks climb into a red Cadillac and drive away toward the west, where a bank of quilty clouds has lowered the sky."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
"Our own talk is always of the jokey-quippy-irony style and lets us leap happily over 'certain things' to other 'certain things' - cozy intimacy, sex and rapture, ours in a heartbeat."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
"I don't have anything quippy to tweet."Meghan McCain, after Donald Trump's meeting with Putin, 16 July 2018.
The effect of this rabbity digital proliferation has not just been economic; it's also aethetic.The Atlantic, November 2006.
I stroked her ears and tapped her rabbity teeth.Julian Barnes, 'The Only Story'.
"Lemme know what that's like man, some of his songs are too radioy but holiday inn was OK."
After electors in state capitals across the country finalize the certified results, those same Republicans are realizing they may have to actually part ways with their whiny, rage-y, delusional Dear Leader.Kerry Eleveld, Daily KOS, 10 December 2020.
College Guys, Stop Being So RapeyReported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
As I know from my rednecky upstate second hometown...Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
Community Gets RelationshippySlate, 06 April 2012.
George: I got it. You wanna get her something nice? How 'bout a music box?'Seinfeld: The Deal'.
Jerry: No, too relationshippy. She opens it up, she hears that Laura's theme, I'm dead.
Homer Simpson: Hey, boy, we're supposed to be acting religiousy.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
In general, we are not really a research group, nor is GUADEC a researchy conference.
...little IKEA pencils and ribbony-y plastic tape measures.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
Very rollercoastery feel to this one,Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 03 June 2022.
In an interview on the 'Fresh Air' radio show, with David Bianculli, Sarah Silverman said she was tired of playing roommatey roles, in which she was the star's best friend.
I can hear men's voices in the background and a big, roomy gap, like he's trying to decide what to say.Gillian Flynn, 'Gone Girl'.
"Pardon me, Your Honor," he said, and he trotted over to my table with his short, rumpy canter and, holding his hand high, made as though to dump the bullets in my hand, at the same time saying: "The People now hand defense counsel for inspection the bullets that killed Barney Quill."Robert Traver, 'Anatomy of a Murder'.
Not everything is through happiness of course there are saddy moments too.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
Normcore is safe. Normcore is same-y. The normcore look is a knowing piss-take of the heterosexual male's desperate desire to be sartorially unremarkable. Normcore is not brave or butch or swagger-y. Normcore is about dressing like a mild-mannered mental patient or a bewildered Icelandic exchange student circa 1984.Slate Magazine, 07 April 2014.
So far I like 'I see you when you're sleeping' the best, I said. But does that sound too Santa Clausy?Curtis Sittenfeld, 'Prep'.
But suddenly it all came flooding back: the taste of cigars, the sausagey fingers.Clare Naylor and Mimi Hare, 'The Second Assistant'.
Its greenish-black folds gave out a moist sawdusty smell suggestive of prolonged sessions against bar-room walls.Edith Wharton, 'The Age of Innocence'.
Whooie! Mert, that rice is gittin' a mite scaldy!George the Squirrel, in Walt Kelly's daily comic strip 'Pogo', 28 August 1952.
He is drunk, his breath scotchy, tainted with bitter belches, barbecue gone sour.A M Homes, 'Music for Torching'.
"London, in this moist, rather blowy cold, took on a seasidey air."A N Wilson, 'The Vicar of Sorrows'.
He locked the crook of his arm in the crook of Bradley's knee and punched with all his might, his neck bending and his cheeks to Bradley's ribs and his lungs filling with the smell, scalpy and strong, which he'd thought was Bradley's distinctive smell, the smell of the sheets in the bunk above him, until he turned twelve and started to smell that way himself.Jonathan Franzen, 'The Twenty-Seventh City'.
"This sounds schemey. Redolent of thwart.The character Roman Roy, in the HBO series 'Succession'.
"Science-y Suspense."Subheading in "Bookpage", February 2010.
Yesterday, I went all sciencey on a gorgeous picture of M83, a nearby spiral galaxy.Phil Plait, 'Bad Astronomy', Slate magazine, 2 December 2012.
"We didn't want the conference to be too far out, or too science fictiony."Mitchell Waldrop, 'Complexity'.
Library rules were schoolmarmish and scoldy.Susan Orlean, 'The Library Book'.
Washington Post journalists Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta will be out June 29 with "Nightmare Scenario," a scoopy narrative of President Trump's chaotic response to the pandemic.Mike Allen, Axios, 19 March 2021.
"That's what mamma's brothers and sisters always tell me. They say I am Scotchy.Anthony Trollope, 'Miss McKenzie'.
For my part, I noted an embarrassingly self-helpy "anti-boredom docket" in February, including such sage suggestions as "listen to a podcast," "text [friend]," "text [different friend]," and "finish The Wire."Katy Waldman, Slate Magazine, 23 September 2015.
The exercise seems so self-helpy and puerile, but a few more things come to mind inadvertently.Mary Karr, 'Lit'.
After logging on to the service, AOL members descend, Dante-like, from the cheerful servicey, slightly vapid airline-magazine tone of the opening screen to the People Connection, a level with a kind of mixer atmosphere of off-color, tongue-hanging, "let's get friendly", boy-girl, girl-boy, girl-girl, boy-boy humor; to the member rooms, which present a series of doorways into Fellini-like fetishes, and down deeper into private rooms, where autoeroticism rises at least to the level of pulp fiction if not to some new form of entertainment or even twenty-first-century sexuality.Michael Wolff, "Burn Rate".
Later, when Ilana's family finds out about the incident, the show gets servicey.Amanda Hess, Slate Magazine, 04 February 2015.
After a thorough examination of the water below, Carl spoke with the thick Maine accent that reminded me of home. "Yup. It looks sharky to me. How many miles to go before we set?"Linda Greenlaw, 'The Hungry Ocean'.
"You show a nasty, domineering, sheiky spirit which I don't like to see."PG Wodehouse, 'Doctor Sally'.
"Girl Friends," opening today at the Outer Circle 1, suffers from such a threadbare screenplay and tentative personality that one can't help marveling at its shlumpy appeal.Gary Arnold, The Washington Post, 27 September 1978.
They're checking the other parts of him. "He's fine, just a little shocky".A M Homes, 'Music for Torching'.
The nature of our current discourse - especially our online discourse - is such that a great premium is placed on saying things in new and unexpected ways, and also on saying things fast and shorthandy because, well, because of cultural ADHD.Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
Like the Eraserhead infant that won't stop mewling, wrinkly old Benjamin Button has been irking me all week. I was initially very shoulder-shruggy about this curious case: It took forever to get moving, and when it did, the motion was - just OK.Jeanette Catsoulis, Salon Magazine, 9 January 2009.
Today, the word pundit pretty much refers to any one of the preening jackals who host (or appear as guests on) the dozens of shouty cable TV programs from which we ostensibly get our 'news'.Neel Shah, Radar Magazine, 22 July 2008.
Thirty or more years ago, this Friday lunch was instituted: a shouty, argumentative, smoky, boozy gathering attended by journalists, poets and cartoonists at the end of another working week.Julian Barnes, 'Nothing to Be Frightened of'.
Murphy categorized Cruz's particular strain of principled behavior at the RNC as both showboat-y and "Me, Me, Me," something with which the conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker agreed.Alex Wagner, The Atlantic online, 21 July 2016.
He knew more things: that she hated sheets that weren't pressed; that she thought suntans were show-offy unless gotten in the line of work; that she felt letters ought to be written with a fountain pen.Laurie Colwin, 'Happy All the Time'.
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'.
She developed a shorthand signal on set, to indicate to Robin when his ad-libbing was getting too shticky.David Itzkoff, 'Robin'.
"It still smells like smoke." I sniffed it: it did smell singey.David Plotz, 'The Genius Factory: The curious history of the Nobel Prize sperm bank'.
Sleep eluded Alfred. Each sinusy gasp of Enid's seemed to pierce his ear the instant he was poised afresh to drop off.Jonathan Franzen, 'The Corrections'.
It's funny, in my writer's room, sometimes I'll pitch something and Jenni Konner, who's my main collaborator, she'll say, "That's a little sitcom-y."Lena Dunham.
"@" (My suggestion. Susan said the name sounded too skateboardy, and Ethan said somebody's probably already used it, anyway.)Douglas Coupland, 'Microserfs'.
"He used a lot of aluminum paint early on, and there was a skyey, spinning feeling to them, so I would suggest names from a star book Zack had bought when we first went out to the Island and he could see the stars the way he had seen them out west."John Updike, 'Seek My Face'.
Slanty design is an approach that extends user-centered design by focusing on the things that people should (and should not) be able to do with the products behind the design.Russell Beale, Communications of the ACM, January 2007.
1/ Everyone Is Composing Long, Numbered, Slash-y Threads on Twitter. 2/2 Here’s Why.Slate, 04 August 2016.
So far, my visit to Art and Music had been what I'd expected - the department was silent, almost slumbery, filled with people tenderly flipping pages of oversize art books, or lined up at the desk asking where they could find books on cello theory or protest songs or recent copies of Bead & Button magazine.Susan Orlean, 'The Library Book'.
He turned to me and gave me the hug instead. Then a smacky kiss on the cheek, as if we'd known each other for years.Tony Hendra, 'Father Joe'.
And a linguistic journey into the heart of Staten Island leads inexorably to the Talk of the Town Tavern, a train-station bar on Great Kills's very small-towny main street, where Statenisms flow nearly as freely as the $2 draft mugs.The New York Times, 14 December 2007.
Movies that make you bawl were sometimes called five-hankie weepies, a sneery label calculated to insult the film and the teary filmgoer alike.The New York Times, 21 December 2007.
"A lot of people were very excited for me to do more Alexis, and play the blond socialitey character", she said.Alex Barasch, quoting Annie Murphy, The New Yorker, 14 June 2021.
Jeannie said later that it made her envision Abby arriving in heaven all brisk and bustly and socialworky.Anne Tyler, 'A Spool of Blue Thread'.
The discipline of being in the same place doing the same thing at the same time, however somersaulty, is beyond her.Tibor Fischer, 'The Collector Collector'.
It Took One Day for Byte to be As Spammy As the Rest of the InternetHeadline in Slate, 28 January 2020.
Its charming, funny, diverse ensemble of actresses - anchored by a wonderful (and wonderfully written) performance from Betty Gilpin as the buxom blond nonheroine of the wrestling ring - was the year's best, warmest, and most spandex-y company.Willa Paskin, Slate, 12 December 2018
They simply wrapped a chain around each bush, attached it to their spendy truck, and drove off.Dr Dobbs Journal, January 2006.
It could be that Americans at large are considering cutting down on alcohol, leading to a rise in spendy non-alcoholic beverages, which Mull also points to as evidence of her thesis.Shannon Palus, Slate, 02 April 2019
From that position she shot Fabyan a sphinxy, sidelong gaze.Jason Fagone, 'The Woman Who Smashed Codes'.
It had grown decidedly colder and the rain now had a heavy spittley look as it angled through the tangerine glare of streetlights.William Boyd, 'Armadillo'.
He pointed to it pleasantly, made a motion as if lifting a heavily-laden spoon to his mouth, and then made succulent spitty sounds with his lips as if they were dealing with the tastiest of all known delicacies.Flann O'Brien, 'The Third Policeman'.
I've been reading George R.R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice books, so naturally I was glad to learn that book five contains a bit about occupational licensing. I don't think there's anything too spoilery here.Slate Magazine, 20 August 2012.
"Michigan comes close, with its long, sad vistas, its desolate sunsets over squatty frame houses, second-growth forests, flat interstates and dog-eared towns like Dowagiac and Munising."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
He paid for his beer and sat down in the corner of the tacky pretend stabley/countryish, totally imitation pub.Craig Ferguson, 'Between the Bridge and the River'.
But the room was so hot, he felt staggery - his wife and the hero begged him to retire to his cabin.Susan Sontag, 'The Volcano Lover'.
A DISPATCH FROM BOWERSTOCKHeadline in Slate Magazine, 20 May 2010.
Among Crystal Bowersox's sweet, only slightly stalker-y fan base in greater Toledo
"Stanton and Deasy turned up nothing at Aislinn's work, no rumors of an affair with the boss or anyone else, no unrequited crushes either way, no office feuds, no stalkery clients."Tana French, 'The Trespasser'.
Karla began talking all Star Trekky again - the best thing about her.Douglas Coupland, 'Microserfs'.
The Mandalorian’s second season is going to get more Star Wars-y, in a good wayA headline on the Verge website, 29 October 2020.
There's a vicar called the Bish and a creepy guy with starey eyes who paints with knives.Peter Lovesey, 'Down Among the Dead Men'.
When I was ten years old and entering a new and statusy school, I made a gaffe that scarred me for life (as only sixth-grade gaffes can do).David Coleman, The New York Times, 24 April 2008.
I will be happy when this super tight, flat, stencily style of painting stops being cool.
I have oddly vivid memories of biting into a hot dog as a child, then looking at the imprint my chomp had made on the end of the dog - a little square wave, a butte, a sticky-outie part where a normal person would have just seen a bite mark.
Ted Kooser is an agreeable looking young man with sticky-outy ears, and he's sitting in front of two beers - Pabst beers.Nicholson Baker, "The Anthologist".
"A secret high sign to big Al, who understands me and everything perfectly and clasps his big stirrupy hands in front of him in a Masonic one-man handshake."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
"Off the train steps a buxom young nun, in the blackest, most orthodox habit, carrying a slick attache case and a storky umbrella."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
She'd come home with these dresses and strappy shoes, and all I wanted was clothes like that.Meg Wolitzer, 'The Wife'.
"Beefy! Creamy! Stroganoffy!"A television ad for prepared food.
"Do you go to Hudson's much? That's a really studenty place."Michael Bracewell, 'Divine Concepts of Physical Beauty'.
"Then one night at the Standard, Stellings introduced someone he'd met at a party who worked for some studenty magazine - mostly just lists of what's on in the cinema, but with some reviews, interviews and conspiracy theory 'news' stories."Sebastian Faulks, 'Engleby'.
Sam had smoothed over my exit from work by having a chat with Quigley, the Murder squad's resident mistake, and telling him in confidence that I was taking a break to finish my degree, which meant I would be covered if anyone spotted me hanging around town looking studenty.Tana French, 'The Likeness'.
"Sleepwalking" is the directorial debut of William Maher; the writer is Zac Stanford (who wrote the Sundance-y suburban drama "The Chumscrubber".)
As the marquee offerings grew more mediocre, more familiar kinds of low-budget, Sundancey indies began to assert themselves.
Try as you might, there's no resisting The Commitments. Yes, it's sporadically slick, surfacy, and manipulative (it is directed by Alan Parker after all) but these are just words...Ken Turan, 'Never Coming to a Theater Near You'.
The surface area to volume ratio is larger for small objects than for large objects. Small objects are more surfacy than large objects of the same shape.Richard Dawkins, 'Climbing Mount Improbable'.
...a surfacy, objective, "cinematic" third-person narrative eye.David Foster Wallace, 'Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young'.
Normcore is safe. Normcore is same-y. The normcore look is a knowing piss-take of the heterosexual male's desperate desire to be sartorially unremarkable. Normcore is not brave or butch or swagger-y. Normcore is about dressing like a mild-mannered mental patient or a bewildered Icelandic exchange student circa 1984.Slate Magazine, 07 April 2014.
"It's a bit manic. Never like this at agriculture. People tend not to get so sweary about wheat."Toby, in 'In the Loop'.
What was there better, in its way, than that scene, my small mother trembling open, the hot sound of her breathing toward me, the swimmy heat and flush of the air?Jane Hamilton, 'Disobedience'.
My children could always see it, could tell the moment when my eyes became swimmy.Meg Wolitzer, 'The Wife'.
That's part of the reason for the fascination with more centrist Democrats like Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Beto O'Rourke and Joe Biden: The states that Trump won, but could easily lose, are swingy - not super-liberal.Axios, 17 March 2019.
The girl, in a swingy black cotton skirt, was straddling the boy, who wore velour sweatpants.Lisa Taddeo, 'Grace'.
Here's a complicated mystery, with a real victim and all sorts of sociological and political lessons, that never got the coverage it deserved after self-righteous media scolds who mainly work for MSM organizations that are now going broke used it to symbolize the allegedly trivial, tabloidy coverage before 9/11!Slate Magazine, 18 July 2008.
He is apoplectic, incensed, irate, vexed, sore, peeved, tantrum-y, mad online, mad offline, mad in a boat, mad with a goat, mad in the rain, mad on a train.Katy Waldman, Slate Magazine, 10 May 2017.
"The Incredible Hulk" picks up the story of Bruce Banner - the guy with anger management problems - some five years after the end of his tantrummy misadventures in "Hulk".David Denby, The New Yorker, 32 June 2008.
In a teachery style he talks with the expectation of being listened to.Tibor Fischer, 'The Collector Collector'.
"East Hampton has an image to uphold," King griped, "Prissy and tearoomy."Steven Gaines, 'Philistines at the Hedgerows'.
In your right ear you hear an intelligent woman reading alphabetized words like abdominal cavity, adrenal, algae, brackish, bronchial tree, catastrophic, cephalothorax, conflicting, and contour feathers, while in your left, a Ted Baxtery voice booms out political cliches.Nicholson Baker, 'Essays and Other Lumber'.
"You're being very teenagery today," Mom said.John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars'.
Remember that this piece of writing is sometimes called a Teaching Philosophy. Now I dislike that term, because I think it encourages writers to be even more wooey and tell-y than otherwise, but it does point to one major goal: the statement has to articulate a wide general good that can be achieved through university pedagogy at its broadest level.Karen Kelsky, 'The Professor is In'.
"So he wasn't always so... tentacley?"The movie 'Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End'.
I admit, I didn't read her [Molly Ivins's] columns a lot, but when I did I'd laugh at a turn of phrase, applaud a 'go git em!' sentiment, and not really mind when she got all Texasy and stuff.
In addition to the Stack, my father typically had on his bedside table the five or six books he was currently reading - a novel or two, a few works of nonfiction, a volume of poetry, 'Comprehensive Russian Grammar' or some other textbooky thing - and when he finished one of these he would toss it into the space between the dresser and the wall.Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker, 25 March 2019
The text-y era of the nobody-knows-you're-a-dog Internet is ending. You either have a head shot or you're invisible.Michael Agger, "I Look Stupid", in Slate Magazine, 15 July 2008.
Sometimes (in my experience, often) you have to produce wireframes, or draft layouts, before you've nailed down the contents, and you want them to look somewhat realistic so you can look at the Gestalt to help you determine whether you're on the right track. This requires having some amount of texty-looking stuff, and dummy text is the fastest way to include it.
...in a Morristown marriage counselor's office, watching the therapist's thatchy eyebrow ascend as Maura described sex with her new chef-lover as 'frankly the most liberating experience' of her life.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
Solving in software hurts here too - if you can't see all the clues at once laid out in front of you, your eye can't pick up the ellipses in those theme clues, which is the tip that something themey is going on.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 31 March 2018.
That patronizing, therapisty sort of tone. I hate it when you do that.Claire Messud, 'The Emperor's Children'.
On the other hand, answers like AFILISTS and POKERPROS suggest a massive constructing software wordlist that has not been carefully curated. I recognize those things as things, but they're just not thingy enough.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 22 May 2021.
Sol sweated for a night or two, anxiety/thinky sweat, not the normal fatty adolescent kind that he usually had going, although he was still pouring out that stuff too.Craig Ferguson, 'Between the Bridge and the River'.
Both versions turn a thinky book into a talky teleplay - even in the big-budget movie, some parts of the story are conveyed in conversation rather than shown.Slate magazine, December 8, 2011.
Want a thinky leader? That's HillaryWashington Post headline, 9 August 2017.
Super thinky clues are one way to add difficulty to a puzzle, but those really have to land for me or else I get irked.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 23 May 2020.
The frogs are bellowing loudly, their throaty croaks mingling with the thunder that's growling all around us.Shari Caudron, 'Who Are You People?'.
I sensed immediately that he'd once been overweight; he moved with a fat person's tiptoey apology, although he was lanky - or at least, tall enough to appear so.Jennifer Egan, 'Look at Me'.
The branches were hung with tissuey pale green clusters that looked artificial rather than organic: the Camperdown elm's comical flowers.Douglas Hobbie, 'The Day'.
Even the plaster busts on the mantelpiece - Homer? Cicero? I forget - turning on me their blind eyes, had acquired a faint, tobaccoey sheen.Graham Swift, 'Out of this World'.
It was nearly the same red as the mock turtleneck Piero wore, a red that was just faintly tomatoey, as if the tiniest drop of orange had been added.Anne Packer, 'The Dive from Clausen's Pier'.
Her body was saggy, her kisses wet and tonguey, tasting of scotch and tobacco.David Guy, 'The Autobiography of My Body'.
"It sure seems like a waste it being all toothpicky and fragile and all."Joel, encouraging the robots to destroy his toothpick model of Monticello, on the 'Mitchell' episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
As far-fetched as it sounds, such torque-y plotting works, catching the audience off guard, even if the quasi-feminist payoff to the story is less satisfying than it should be, thanks mostlyto the film's puerile fascination with girl-on-girl action.Michael O'Sullivan, The Washington Post, 27 January 2017.
I hate it when the chick's voice sounds all trebly , but that never happens in your productions.From the movie 'Sugar Town'.
From down the avenue she heard trebly music.Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
I was willing to think that the tagline was something dreamed up by the marketing department and the movie wouldn't be that triumph-of-human-spirit-y, but it is.From a review of 'Impossible', Slate Magazine, 20 December 2012.
Feminism is the idea that men and women should be equal in the work force, at home, in society, on all of the levels. Most people except for some trolly extremists can get behind this general notion.Reported by Ben Yagoda, Slate Magazine, 17 October 2014.
Roger Thornhill: "Can you recommend anything?"The Alfred Hitchcock movie, 'North by Northwest'.
Eve Kendall: "The brook trout. A little trouty, but quite good."
"What's wrong with Louis Armstrong?"
"It's too trumpety."
The snores of Mr Malloy's tenants in the pipes have a deep tunnelly quality.John Steinbeck, 'Cannery Row'.
There were stations every twenty miles, but a station here was three small square buildings, the same brown as the turdy desert.Paul Theroux, 'Riding the Iron Rooster'.
"Things are a little turmoily - the usual reasons: small-town politics, everybody knows everybody, everybody knows everything."Mark Singer, 'Somewhere in America'.
And I also noticed someting Twilight-Zoney about all the cars on Campus: None of them have bumper stickers, as though everyone is censoring themselves.Douglas Coupland, 'Microserfs'.
My memories of Ted [Cruz] are that he was too loud, too umbragey, and too rehearsed in an activity meant to mirror the clubby, off-the-cuff charms of the British Parliament.Dahlia Lithwick, Salon Magazine, 04 May 2016.
The following set of procs and aliases all have well-known names, but don't expect the full features of their Unix counterparts - they're just unixy.
On second viewing, though, the tone of this show is so odd, the actors are so completely unusual and unsitcomy, that you can't help embracing its scrappy sickness just a little bit in spite of yourself.Heather Havrilesky, Salon online magazine, 26 October 2008.
"You'll find a lot of utensily things available, too."From a radio discussion of "free-cycling", in which people advertise items they are throwing away.
Mr Bienenfeld bought the property for an especially Vegas-y reason: he was tired of having to gamble a certain amount to earn free rooms and amenities on the Strip.The New York Times, 06 March 2009.
There Ernest sat in the living room, nice and settled, looking very Vegasy in crisp new khakis, loafers, and a sports shirt.Christopher Sorrentino, 'Trance'.
"He was wearing this big, cozy, Vermonty sweater."The movie 'Trust the Man'.
"I'm totally happy to make the introduction, but, I've got to say, my mother is a vibey, spiritual, super-smart person with a point of view."The New Yorker, 07 December 2020.
I Tried Ghia, the Vibey, Non-Alcoholic Aperitif Everyone's Talking AboutHeadline in Vice, 20 January 2022.
When Jil Sander introduced her men's collection a decade ago, she figured out a novel way to let men look fashionable without being, as they say, "victim-y".The New York Times, 24 August 2006.
If I get angry, you'll just get all "victim-y".'I Hate Suzie', Episode 3.
Quite frankly, I'm sick of the finger wagging at starlets for being so stupid as to take nude photos of themselves - it's a little victim-blame-y, no?Salon, 15 September 2011.
Being villagey was nothing new to me, nor was the Village itself an escape.Ellen Frankfort, 'The VOICE: Life at the Village Voice'.
From the outside, it looked like a Chinese factory - the same scrubby hedge and sharp fence, the barracks-like teacher's quarters, and the villagey huts nearby.Paul Theroux, 'Riding the Iron Rooster'.
Another girl in a vintagey red polka-dot dress revealed a striking depth of cleavage.The New York Times, 02 May 2008.
Miller was profiled in Guitar Player Magazine, which characterized his playing as "pure melody consciousness... [with] remarkable control, a breathy, violiny tone [and] bell-like consistency."
Every time you read some voice-y dispatch from @Tostitos or @Pepsi or, unnervingly, @MrPeanut, you are consuming the considered thoughts of a salaried adult, whose job it is to replicate some believable form of humanity while hawking its products.Jeremy Gordon, The Outline, 7 February 2019.
He can feel the dampness off the lake - big and dark and voidy.Michael Hainey, 'After Visiting Friends'.
She coughs. She summons what she can, a short burst, vowelly, cattish.A M Homes, 'Music for Torching'.
The store smelled of sugar cones, sweet and waffley.Anne Packer, "The Dive from Clausen's Pier".
Dave was in the collection business, though the term he preferred - insisted upon, actually - was "Debt acquisition", which had a much more gilded, Wall Street-y ring to it than "collection agency".Jonathan Miles, 'Want Not'.
I'm not needy, I'm wanty!A framed slogan for sale at Hobby Lobby.
Or rather, there's lots of stuff around the north end of the Bay Bridge, in around the warehousey neighborhood.Douglas Coupland, "Microserfs".
"Love - the most beautiful, shiny, warmy thing in the world - you couldn't accept it?"The movie "Knocked Up".
"Zack knew he hadn't found it yet, those outdoorsy watercolory Mattisse-y paintings you were praising weren't quite there yet, though you're right, they were closer, they were freer, he'd gotten away from those deadly brown Mexican muralists and that Miroesque Surrealist clutter."John Updike, 'Seek My Face'.
"It's getting kind of waterworky back there."A cast member of 'Schitt's Creek', on the after show documentary.
"Well", Margaret said, pushing her hair behind her ears, "a ring looks a bit weddingy to me."Joanna Trollope, 'Sense and Sensibility'.
Michael: "Where is your dad?"'Arrested Development'.
Maeby: "He left, dressed all western-y."
Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-whoooaaaaaaugh! - piles of whichy whuh words - which, when, where, who, whether, whuggheeee, the living whichy thickets. All that was from a story called "Letter from Broadway" by Calvin Trillin, but it is not a rare case or even Trillin's fault.Tom Wolfe, "Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker".
A lot of science fiction movies have wardrobes and exteriors that look so shiny, and white-y, and military, like NASA, so I chose something different, more like a jail.Clair Denis, quoted on Slate, 05 April 2019.
They walked in silence, ..., completely ignoring their public, (several widowy looking women and us), the younger ones in step, the older ones shuffling or limping.Tony Hendra, "Father Joe".
The devil's delight, a thumbing of the nose at God with all his rocks and trees and little wildlifey squirrels and bunny rabbits, all the Disney bullshit.Craig Ferguson, 'Between the Bridge and the River'.
In the left-hand basin, last night's glasses gave off a winey smell.Anne Packer, 'The Dive from Clausen's Pier'.
Granted, that was partly because her district was redrawn, forcing her into a primary against another sitting Republican congressional representative who is only slightly less wingnutty.Salon Magazine, 01 July 2016.
On Friday night, one of Emily's witchdoctory psychic friends was in the audience and she talked about all these spirits she had seen in the room, singing along.
When he had that done, he gathered up all Nessa's clothes, her lovely womanny perfumey clothes, and packed them all into a trunk and dragged it upstairs.Patrick McCabe, 'The Dead School'.
You're kinda like a peppy, fun-gun set to MILF, with like, a ... Lean In, womany branding thing that works well with the Fitbit-moron-whatever people.The character 'Roman Roy' in the HBO series 'Succession'.
AIR CARRIER seems like an awfully wordlisty answer. An answer only a computer could love.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 09 April 2016.
There is an easy, wristy flourish to his phrasing, which an artist-journalist like Revel is qualified to appreciate.Clive James, 'Cultural Amnesia'.
My game was wristy, optimistic, and largely self-taught.Julian Barnes, 'The Only Story'.
"I had to laugh I was getting so Wyethy, everybody had always sneered at him so, but I was trying to cleanse myself of abstraction before going back in."John Updike, 'Seek My Face'.
"Yeah. But they are so yachty", I said, making a word up when I couldn't find the right one. "I think you'd have to live on the ocean to get away with them."Chris Bohjalian, 'Midwives'.
When it rained, J read Yeats and wrote Yeatsy poems.Ian MacNiven, 'Literchoor is My Beat', a life of James Laughlin.
While it's important to consider the interests of groups that rely on the key (those with disabilities that make it difficult to press more than one key at a time, for instance, and people engaged in professions that frequently use all-uppercase text), caps lock also inherently favors yell-y Internet commenters, people who design terrible flyers, and others who deserve little consideration.Matthew Malady, Slate Magazine, 01 February 2012.
"The entire tourist cabin of our 727 virtually vibrates with its grave ying-yangy appeal."Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'.
I feel like I know the term GROUPCHAT from my daughter, but now that I think about it, it's not especially youth-y - but it is fresh, and one of my favorite answers of the day.Rex Parker, 'Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle', 14 August 2020.
Do not submit to The Chumscrubber. I mean it. This was one of the worst films I've seen in an awfully long time. So poorly contrived (a mishmash of supposed zeitgeisty totems), appallingly directed and almost uniformly badly acted.
It [The Social Network]'s also the subject of one of those feverish social-media marketing campaigns that makes major pop-culture spectacles, sight unseen, carry all kinds of irrelevant Zeitgeisty baggage.Andrew O'Hehir, Salon Magazine, 23 September 2010.
"This is so Zenny", Bug said happily, as some poor cretin purchased his used electric razor (ugh!) as well as his collection of Elle MacPherson merchandise.Douglas Coupland, 'Microserfs'.