(n.) A short poem treating concisely and pointedly of a single thought or event. The modern epigram is so contrived as to surprise the reader with a witticism or ingenious turn of thought, and is often satirical in character.
(n.) An effusion of wit; a bright thought tersely and sharply expressed, whether in verse or prose.
(n.) The style of the epigram.
Example Sentences:
(1) He has just released a new album, Epigrams and Interludes .
(2) Anna Karenina set out to be a tract against adultery in high society; "Vengeance is mine and I will repay," is the epigram on the novel's title page.
(3) "Bratza takes issue with the apparently resentful epigram coined by the late supreme court justice Lord Rodger: "Argentoratum locutum: iudicium finitum – Strasbourg has spoken, the case is closed".
(4) The play opens with a great comic tour de force as Lord Are attempts to have himself arranged by his servant in the manner of a Gainsborough painting so that he might appear at home in the countryside, all the time spouting epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde: "A poem should be well cut and fit the page ... the secret of literary style lies in the margins."
(5) I don't know if the closing ceremony will quote those other indelible lines from Shakespeare's great valedictory play, The Tempest , to bookend the opening epigram, but you can't help feeling it should: "Our revels now are ended.
(6) On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story.
(7) But these days, he is full of epigrams about looking on the bright side and some of his phrases feel as worn down as an ocean-tossed pebble, smoothed through years of repetition to reporters, his family, himself: "You get what you get and you don't get upset", "It is what it is."
(8) Stephen Galilee (@SjGalilee) I am supporting #australiansforcoal because anti-coal activists waste a lot of time entertaining themselves with smart arse tweets about it April 14, 2014 But maybe Galilee should remember the often-invoked Oscar Wilde epigram about publicity .
(9) Very often inscriptions--above all grave epigrams--with their great tradition from various times and localities provide many good examples of daily life including valuable references to the practice, ethics and social situation of physicians.
(10) But for a while he spoke only in lapidary epigrams.
(11) It should please those who prefer to have their clichés masquerading as epigrams."
(12) His own vocabulary and the heavily weighted emphasis of his speech is so embedded in public consciousness that it has become a comic style as recognisable as an epigram from Oscar Wilde or a line from one of his other literary heroes, PG Wodehouse.
Epigrammatic
Definition:
() Alt. of Epigrammatical
Example Sentences:
(1) Wilde takes no prisoners from the very outset: “The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others.” It’s a very Wildean, quasi-epigrammatic reversal – the reader expects something worthy, collectivist and altruistic, instead he gets something that’s irreverent, individualistic and apparently selfish.
(2) Christopher Isherwood, when he finished reading them, on July 5 1940, was in no doubt as to their importance in this regard: "Here, gossip achieves the epigrammatic significance of poetry.
(3) What he achieves is a kind of epigrammatic excavation, uprooting stories that have been mislaid or misappropriated, and presenting them in their full glory, horror or absurdity.
(4) They’re almost like little epigrammatic proverbs.
(5) A bad break-up proved grist to his epigrammatic mill ("This person that I thought was the love of my life ended up being the love of my youth," he says) and gave him his abiding lyrical theme: the conflicted nature of desire.