(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.
Pithy
Definition:
(superl.) Consisting wholly, or in part, of pith; abounding in pith; as, a pithy stem; a pithy fruit.
(superl.) Having nervous energy; forceful; cogent.
Example Sentences:
(1) And while Altmejd presents sexual scenes of cartoonish horror and disgust, Lucas's art has embraced lavatorial humour, abjection, self-denigration, the pithy sculptural one-liner and the obscene gesture.
(2) This headline is a closely packed, multifaceted, pithy, rousing, basically perfect example of how strikes are presented in the tabloids, and have been for years.
(3) In fact, her pithy insults are deployed so regularly that colleagues on the spending watchdog have come up with the idea of playing “Margaret Hodge bingo”, scoring points when one of her putdowns pops out.
(4) The reshuffle had inspired some pithy one-liners and the PM was determined to deploy them all.
(5) Someone who bought tickets for a tennis event at the O2 sent me this pithy tweet: “4 tickets.
(6) There are plenty of 30-page documents and pithy slogans – but, as far as I can discover, nothing in between.
(7) It was a pithy line that feeds into the schtick about a bloated Brussels filled with born bureaucrats.
(8) The hawkish senator also defined his foreign policy: “A clenched fist and an open hand, you choose.” But the extent to which such pithy quips will help bolster Graham’s campaign – the senator is currently polling at 0.5% – remains questionable.
(9) But he has left Labour vulnerable over Brexit because the policy is so nuanced it cannot easily be boiled down to a pithy remark .
(10) Shortly after the YouTube sensation that was Jeremy Paxman's October interview with Russell Brand , Paxman wrote a pithy column about his disillusion with Westminster politics.
(11) Johnson, whose pithy interventions have caused embarrassment for all the major parties since the election campaign kicked off, opened the debate by stressing the gulf between the two major parties’ tax and spending plans.
(12) Sated by three years of Special One pyrotechnics, the British press might be ready to be charmed by Ramos' brand of quietly pithy humour.
(13) Obama: While the president generally struggled to get his "zingers" across, over-larding them with too much detail, he did get in a pithy dig about Romney's vague budget proposals which he claimed didn't add up.
(14) Jimmy Fallon, the host of the 2017 Golden Globes, has made a career of creating pithy viral moments that transcend television and resonate on the internet, but at this year’s ceremony the host was outdone by a bizarre recurring slip-up.
(15) In the months since their formation, the eight members of Pussy Riot have perfected their own form of protest: their songs are pithy, angry missives, largely directed at Putin, and they remain beguilingly anonymous – the band wear neon balaclavas to conceal their identities and perform flash gigs in unexpected places: on public transport, for example, and, once, on a prison roof.
(16) Instead, finance ministers signed up to a pithy list of bullet points, pledging to unleash all the policy weapons at their disposal against the crisis.
(17) The club was the brainchild of New Jersey shoe salesman Barney Josephson: a pithy antidote to the snooty, often racist elitism of other New York nightspots.
(18) But threnodies are not an argument, and memories are definitely not facts (Hobsbawm's pithy condemnation of oral history, delivered at a conference where I was due to speak, was terrifying).
(19) From a leader not known for her trenchant words or pithy sound bites her strong stance of the past few days has come as a surprise.
(20) You might expect he’d specialise in pithy one-liners, but in fact Delaney spins longer yarns onstage, all powered by a spirit of relentless cynicism.