(n.) A whimsical figure, or scene, such as is found in old crypts and grottoes.
(n.) Artificial grotto-work.
Example Sentences:
(1) There was some fertile ground in which that grotesque lie could be sown.
(2) There are allegations of very, very serious dereliction of duty and of wrongdoing by people in the police at the time who were investigating – it is alleged – some of the most grotesque crimes imaginable.” According to Newsnight, the officers involved said they did not know the senior figure who threatened them.
(3) That's completely and utterly grotesque and, no matter how proud we all are in the labour movement that the minimum wage exists, not a single day goes by that we shouldn't be disgusted with ourselves for that.
(4) They look like grotesque open-air swimming pools - and they contain some of the UK's biggest problems regarding nuclear waste.
(5) I still believe that the diversion of ever wider tracts of arable land from feeding people to feeding livestock is iniquitous and grotesque.
(6) The voices of the other characters – Thomas's mother as well as a cast of recognisable grotesques: a taxi driver, a bully, the local drunk – add to the atmosphere of dissolving reality and, at times, to the sense that they may exist only in Magill's head.
(7) The grotesque merry-go-round of more people selling fewer overpriced homes is in full swing.
(8) Jimmy Savile told hospital staff he interfered with patients' corpses, taking grotesque photographs and stealing glass eyes for jewellery, over two decades at the mortuary of Leeds general infirmary.
(9) A combination of dysfunctional family and invasive fame ate away at the essentially private singer, whose initially minor eccentricities escalated into grotesque changes to his appearance and lifestyle.
(10) The church cannot face in two directions like a grotesque two-headed monster: one face for public, the other for private.
(11) O'Brien has since become notorious among equal rights campaigners for his vigorous attacks on gay marriage and gay adoptions , calling homosexuality a "grotesque subversion" and "harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved".
(12) He will still be lauded by those who enjoy this grotesque, sadistic sport, whatever his views on gay people or women.
(13) The model is then subjected to the criticism that it is grotesque to ignore questions relating to the value of, for example, a productive mother over against an aged recluse, and to treat them as having equal rights to access.
(14) Outside, all the talk was of the corruption allegations that had led to a fresh wave of hand-wringing over the greed and grotesque sums in the game.
(15) His once-visionary keywords have grotesque afterlives: Big Brother is a TV franchise to make celebrities of nobodies and Room 101 a light-entertainment show on BBC2 currently hosted by Frank Skinner for celebrities to witter about stuff that gets their goat.
(16) To put it plainly, PFI charges include too high a rate of interest and grotesquely high returns on equity.
(17) But he made grotesque monetary demands for the nonsense of Superman.
(18) His conclusion, outlined in The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard , is that the grotesque murder was not a hate crime, but could instead be blamed on crystal meth, a drug that was flooding Denver and the surrounding area at the time of Matthew’s death.
(19) It's that to portray Israel as some kind of victim with every right to "defend itself" from attack from "outside its borders" is a grotesque inversion of reality.
(20) It also contains a grotesquely racist portrayal of an Asian neighbour by Mickey Rooney.
Macabre
Definition:
Example Sentences:
(1) As the last two people executed in Britain, the macabre anniversary of their deaths at Strangeways prison in Manchester and Walton prison in Liverpool is generating more publicity than their crime and punishment ever did at the time.
(2) Spectators were so closely packed that emergency services had to gather up a macabre jumble of body parts, and the final toll was never confirmed.
(3) Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Macabre allegory’: Otto Dix’s The Triumph of Death (1934).
(4) The first season of Breaking Bad covered the story of Walter's bizarre life-switch with a tone of macabre farce.
(5) After photographs emerged on Thursday of a senior Indonesian police official posing with the prisoners aboard the plane, treasurer Joe Hockey condemned their treatment as “macabre”.
(6) The macabre track record means Karzai will be keen to ensure the elections produce a successor who will not only respect him, but keep him alive.
(7) The fact it was a killing of a child was an aggravating factor, as was his "macabre attempt to conceal her body", and his "substantial record of serious violence".
(8) You are here in the Kingdom of Death,” warns the macabre inscription at the entrance to Les Catacombes de Paris – the underground boneyard filled with the remains of 6 million Parisians, which attracts half a million living and breathing visitors each year.
(9) For that reason, The Fall starts in a comparatively restrained fashion – with Spector exploring someone's private space – stealing underwear, leaving a macabre calling card on the bed, orange peel on the table.
(10) We are seated on sofas in a cavernous, wood-floored room in his Los Angeles base, Studio Della Morte, where instruments (several gongs, a discarded accordion on the floor) compete for space with macabre props (cow skulls, dolls in various states of metamorphosis or dismemberment) and oddball paintings (a hare with boxing gloves).
(11) The notion that Raif Badawi must be allowed to heal so that he can suffer this cruel punishment again and again is macabre and outrageous.
(12) Groups of men with machetes roved the ruins seeking supplies of food or water; others used corpses as roadblocks, a macabre sign that the capital had reached breaking point after four days of apocalyptic scenes.
(13) It was almost macabre, the way this has been handled,” Hockey told Channel Seven.
(14) In the end, we never really know whether Plath was simply an accident waiting to happen, or if she could have avoided her fate, had she achieved the fame that was unfairly denied her until a burgeoning market for macabre, self-absorbed poetry opened up after her death, when being young, white, suburban and suicidal became a rite of passage, if not an outright lifestyle, on both sides of the Atlantic.
(15) "All the soldiers here didn't get support and had to fight alone," said Sifa Mirindi, an unemployed 20-year-old drawn to the macabre visitor attraction beneath the Nyiragongo volcano.
(16) For anyone who wants to play a macabre numbers game, the overall figures are still a smaller proportion than 800 Palestinian deaths out of a Gaza population of 1.8m.
(17) Abo Rabieh's images portray defiant protesters, veiled women, a detainee forced to kneel in a stress position and captors taunting their prisoners with a macabre dance of death – all drawn from everyday experience.
(18) Vincent Price, in a lip-smacking performance, plays homicidal ham actor Edward Lionheart, who rises from the grave to exact a professional and highly macabre revenge.
(19) #Brexit.” There is much to debate about the Brussels atrocity, but for it to be gleefully and so swiftly seized upon as convenient political fodder for the EU debate is macabre.
(20) After a pair of live-action hit movies in the early 90s – The Addams Family and Addams Family Values – had revived interest in Charles Addams' macabre creations, originally conceived as drawings in the New Yorker magazine, a string of cheap TV cartoons as well as a straight to video feature (Addams Family Reunion) had somewhat tarnished the brand.