(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.
Epigraph
Definition:
(n.) Any inscription set upon a building; especially, one which has to do with the building itself, its founding or dedication.
(n.) A citation from some author, or a sentence framed for the purpose, placed at the beginning of a work or of its separate divisions; a motto.
Example Sentences:
(1) "But when you pull together all the evidence – archaeological, epigraphic and literary – it is overwhelming and, we believe, conclusive: they did kill their children, and on the evidence of the inscriptions, not just as an offering for future favours but fulfilling a promise that had already been made.
(2) In one of the epigraphs to the poem "Namely", a bristlingly humorous disquisition on his own unusual surname, he quotes Angus Calder, in Scotland on Sunday: "Few people thought Mick Imlah , who teaches at Oxford, was a 'Scottish poet'."
(3) One of the two epigraphs to my novel Boxer, Beetle , which contains a character based on a young Robert Moses, is a quotation from Jacobs: "We are all accustomed to believe that maps and reality are necessarily related, or that if they are not, we can make them so by altering reality."
(4) The Souls of Black Folk might appear to be a collection of essays (each chapter also has a musical epigraph derived from “10 master songs” from the Negro tradition) but it has a powerfully coherent inner structure.
(5) We are a great nation, but if we continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to be a great nation.” Tizard’s wise words might be an epigraph – and an epitaph – for our story since then.
(6) His chapter, "The Sorrow Songs", expands on the significance of the bars of music from famous Negro spirituals which, alongside verses of English poetry - the two representing the Negro's divided inheritance - are threaded through as epigraphs to each chapter.
(7) In two books, Judd used lines from Camus as epigraphs: "If there were a party of those who aren't sure they're right, I'd belong to it," and "Every wrong idea ends in bloodshed, but it's always the blood of others."