(a.) Cold and cutting; cheerless; as, a bleak blast.
(a.) A small European river fish (Leuciscus alburnus), of the family Cyprinidae; the blay.
Example Sentences:
(1) "The results present a remarkably bleak portrait of life in the UK today and the shrinking opportunities faced by the bottom third of UK society," said the head of the project, Professor David Gordon of Bristol University.
(2) The study says: "The short-term outlook for the labour market looks bleak.
(3) He'd later carry this over into Netflix's House Of Cards but before that, TV had already begun to emulate this new, bleak, antiheroic maturity with a cycle of dark, longform, acclaimed dramas, commencing with The Sopranos and culminating in Breaking Bad .
(4) This is training that predators rely upon,” she says in the book, “It is, perhaps, a form of gender-wide grooming.” For Caro, the opportunity of the book was to “place the blame where it lies,” she says, “squarely on the shoulders of those who use their power to exploit and damage others.” For all its bleakness, I drew comfort from the stories of the other contributors.
(5) Through small and large acts of deprivation and destruction we follow the process: the removal of hope, of dignity, of luxury, of necessity, of self; the reduction of a man to a hoarder of grey slabs of bread and the scrapings of a soup bowl (wonderfully told all this, with a novelist's gift for detail and sometimes very nearly comic surprise), to the confinement of a narrow bed – in which there is "not even any room to be afraid" – with a stranger who doesn't speak your language, to the cruel illogicality of hating a fellow victim of oppression more than you hate the oppressor himself – one torment following another, and even the bleak comfort of thinking you might have touched rock bottom denied you as, when the most immediate cause of a particular stress comes to an end, "you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others".
(6) He said the “bleak alternative” would have been to go through numerous probate courts while distant relatives of Gurlitt made their claims on the collection.
(7) After dismissing the ending of Revolutionary Road as "falsely bleak" and telling his audience that "there's something goofy about American literature since modernism came to an end", the celebrated author of Freedom and The Corrections moved on to social media .
(8) Bleak jokes and cartoons have been circulating for weeks in the anti-Assad camp on the theme of barrel bombs serving as ballot boxes.
(9) "I have such passion for what I do that I can't see it as bleak.
(10) It is to be hoped that pharmaceutical developments will improve the current bleak picture in which there are no proven treatments for ischaemic stroke or intracerebral haemorrhage.
(11) Next month Commonwealth leaders gather in Sri Lanka amid a bleak human rights situation as the country emerges from two decades of civil war that saw 40,000 civilians lose their lives .
(12) Things began to look bleak for the Saddlers when Chelsea extended their lead four minutes from the interval.
(13) The compelling television series The Returned , which concludes on Sunday on Channel 4, and several award-winning titles from French authors are earning fresh international plaudits for Gallic storytelling and proving that it is not only Norway, Sweden and Denmark that can offer a bleak outlook and a half-lit landscape.
(14) The alternative is to leave our young children facing a bleak future.
(15) Concomitant other distant metastases conferred a bleak prognosis.
(16) "I don't know why," he says, but it's something that didn't even happen at his lowest ebb: amid the bleakness of the early 70s, he somehow kept sporadically producing incredible songs: Til I Die, This Whole World, Sail On Sailor… There's always touring, however.
(17) The forecast is for one of the coldest winters in Syria for 100 years, with more than four million people displaced inside the country and an estimated two million who have fled into neighbouring countries, facing an increasingly bleak existence.
(18) The Reading group reaction to Bleak House has been overwhelmingly positive.
(19) The childish vulnerability she brings out in Sara balances out the visual bleakness of the film.
(20) The bleak outlook for patients with marrow necrosis based on early experience in adults with disseminated malignancy does not appear to apply to children with ALL.
Contemptuous
Definition:
(a.) Manifesting or expressing contempt or disdain; scornful; haughty; insolent; disdainful.
Example Sentences:
(1) He was contemptuous of Nelson’s small target strategy even in the early years in opposition, insisting voters always needed to know what a party stood for, and that it should stand for big ideas.
(3) He dictates the next rally and when Murray decides to go for another lob, Dimitrov is on to the ruse and swats a contemptuous smash away to seal the first set that flashed by in the blink of an eye!
(4) (Of course, she was also perfectly aware of the feminist content, what it said about the disgusted-attracted-contemptuous male gaze, but she preferred the art to ask the questions, discomfit, not preach.)
(5) Thatcher was contemptuous of "the centre ground" and withering about consensus politics, holding it to be responsible for Britain's postwar decline and believing it to be a recipe for getting nothing done.
(6) It held its first national congress in Algiers, and although it was contemptuous of existing political organisations, Poujade made his own political party, Union et Fraternité Française.
(7) His enemies argue that he divided Europe by launching an illegal war; he kept the UK out of the eurozone and the Schengen agreement ; he is contemptuous of democracy (surely a qualification?
(8) It is rife with secrecy, top-down managerial manipulation, impervious to any outside scrutiny, contemptuous of any questioning, and has embraced extensive surveillance and discriminatory policing of religious and racial minorities.
(9) Photograph: AAP In her famous 1913 pamphlet, Round about a pound a week , Maud Pember Reeves wrote contemptuously about “the gospel of porridge” – the idea, still common among the wealthy, that the destitute wouldn’t be so wretched if only they invested their money wisely.
(10) Norte Energia officials are privately contemptuous.
(11) The voices (which by this time had multiplied and become much more aggressive) were witheringly contemptuous about this: "You can't even SPELL schizophrenia," one of them said, "So what the hell are you going to do about having it?!"
(12) Facebook Twitter Pinterest The words returned to haunt Renzi for weeks afterwards, in the fitting form, for this most Twitter-friendly of premiers, of contemptuous hashtags and YouTube satire.
(13) Judge Alistair McCreath said: "When a defendant makes a considered decision to abscond as you did he or she has shown a contemptuous disregard for that important obligation and that in itself matters."
(14) "If it is false, it is libellous; if it is true, it is contemptuous," he added.
(15) He was contemptuous of the way a powerful lobby had manipulated Jewish American opinion, although this compared with the way "the Greek, Armenian, Ukrainian and Irish diasporas have all played an unhealthy role in perpetuating ethnic exclusivism and nationalist prejudice in the countries of their forebears".
(16) But a decade ago, executive leadership fell into the hands of people obsessed with "get big quick" and openly contemptuous of co-operative values.
(17) The campaign, according to Graham, ignored focus group research that showed people were contemptuous of the idea that electoral reform would prevent corruption.
(18) "He doesn't do anything that presidents do, he doesn't worry about any of the things the presidents do, but he has the White House, he has enormous power, and he'll go down in history as the president – and I suspect that he's pretty contemptuous of the rest of us."
(19) Delivering the prestigious Hugh Cudlipp lecture, Dacre harangued what he dubbed the "subsidariat" of newspapers - in which he included the Times and the Guardian - which do not turn a profit and are "consumed by the kind of political correctness that is patronisingly contemptuous of what it describes as ordinary people".
(20) Whatever I asked him about, he was fantastically hostile and contemptuous.