(n.) The state or quality of being irreverent; want of proper reverence; disregard of the authority and character of a superior.
Example Sentences:
(1) This country has had a free press for the last 300 years, that has been irreverent and rude as my website is and holding public officials to account.
(2) Animal Practice is a Universal Television production based on an irreverent New York veterinarian, played by Justin Kirk of Weeds and Angels in America.
(3) There has been much pointing-and-chortling of late at the Daily Mail's embarrassing failure to stoke national outrage over a mildly irreverent comment about the Queen's sex life blurted out by Jack Whitehall on a festive panel show.
(4) One irreverent Australian columnist has suggested that the "Lizard of Oz" may now be more fitting, given that the Aboriginal meaning for Kadina, the country town north of Adelaide where Crosby grew up, is "Lizard Plain".
(5) He showed an irreverence for the lives of the great composers that sometimes came in for criticism.
(6) Ian Hislop, the long-serving editor, had a suitably topical and irreverent take on the vicissitudes of the magazine's circulation.
(7) The required skill of comedians-turned-presenters is to seem irreverent while rocking no boats.
(8) In our own time, Brooke has become the haunting symbol of a doomed generation, flitting across the pages of novels by Alan Hollinghurst and AS Byatt like a volatile and irreverent Peter Pan.
(9) Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman described Entwistle as "clever, erudite, a man, critically, who reads books, a man with a sense of humour and a great degree of irreverence, not least about the BBC.
(10) He could often be seen eating spicy lamb chops at his favourite curry houses, flattering local businessmen and speaking irreverently about parliamentary colleagues.
(11) He achieved a succession of scoops, and was largely responsible for training up a generation of gifted young journalists, notably the irreverent gossip columnist, Nigel Dempster ...
(12) But, unlike the supine press so common abroad, they still have the irreverent vigour and diversity of a true political safeguard.
(13) "I love that a country capable of extraordinary pomp and ceremony can still retain a spiky irreverence towards its establishment.
(14) Hall might be a scion of one of Britain's most important theatrical dynasties (his father is Peter, his half-sister Rebecca), but the cocky irreverence of his productions showed he had every intention of making his own mark.
(15) "The culture of protest needs to develop," one of the members of Pussy Riot said last month, and indeed as much as the band represent a form of protest in Russia, they also embody a shift in culture that echoes the DIY culture that flourished in the Seattle and Olympia areas of Washington in the early 90s – fanzines, garage punk bands, a tone of wild irreverence and a wish to question tradition.
(16) Jordan’s al-Hudoud, a bundle of irreverent online fun, recently ran a delightful story about the arrest of Father Christmas and the confiscation of presents he was distributing.
(17) Because they seemed to represent the best of journalistic virtues – courage, campaigning, toughness, compassion, humour, irreverence; a serious engagement with serious things; a sense of fairness; an eye for injustice; a passion for explaining; knowing how to achieve impact; a connection with readers.
(18) Many Muscovites were happy enough to see a tough response to the band's irreverent act of rebellion, which was aimed at President Vladimir Putin .
(19) I mean merely to josh, not to be blatantly irreverent, for who would seriously argue that Roth's career is not worthy of celebration?
(20) Catch-22 was an irreverent, savage and cruel satire.
Obscenity
Definition:
(n.) That quality in words or things which presents what is offensive to chasity or purity of mind; obscene or impure lanquage or acts; moral impurity; lewdness; obsceneness; as, the obscenity of a speech, or a picture.
Example Sentences:
(1) These letters are also written during a period when Joyce was still smarting from the publishing difficulties of his earlier works Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” Gordon Bowker, Joyce’s biographer, agreed: “Joyce’s problem with the UK printers related to the fact that here in those days printers were as much at risk of prosecution on charges of publishing obscenities as were publishers, and would simply refuse to print them.
(2) The footballer, who plays for club side Gabala and the national team , had waved a Turkish flag during a Europa League match in Cyprus, and appeared to make an obscene gesture at a Greek journalist who asked why he had done so.
(3) A catalogue of errors allowed the broadcast on Radio 2 of a series of obscene messages the pair had left on the actor Andrew Sachs's answerphone.
(4) Randall, a former banking computer analyst and a widower with two grownup daughters, learned on Wednesday that charges of "trafficking obscene material" had been dropped and he was to be deported.
(5) Zimmerman was charged with an offence of sending by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing message or matter.
(6) The Occupy protesters outside St Paul's Cathedral in London named their camp "Tahrir Square" while they sat cross-legged, sang songs and consumed Marks & Spencer sandwiches, oblivious to the obscenity of a comparison with freedom fighters who risked their lives in Egypt.
(7) 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.
(8) Reuters's source said police told Ai: "You criticised the government, so we are going to let all society know that you're an obscene person, you evaded taxes, you have two wives, we want to shame you.
(9) Ing concedes she is hardly a fan of a man she accuses of a "blatant and obscene lack of ethics", but rejects the accusation that the film is anti-Thaksin propaganda: her use of red, for instance, was decided long before it became associated with his redshirts .
(10) The guidelines say that prosecutions should not be brought under obscenity laws but on the basis of the menace and humiliation intended, and in the most serious cases, where intimate images are used to coerce victims into further sexual activity, under the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
(11) Several other places were vetoed on account of various scandals and disputes, and I have also excluded luxurious and obscenely priced retreats.
(12) One Barking and Dagenham resident – a British citizen with Indian Caribbean heritage – described the BNP leaflet campaign as "obscene".
(13) Yet our confusions over the c-word are demonstrated by the fact that it has been common in recent years to find hundreds of women standing in a public arena and yelling the gynaecological obscenity: the setting is performances of the drama The Vagina Monologues, in which one sequence invites women to reclaim and empower the down-there noun.
(14) He was prosecuted under section 127(1) of the Communications Act 2003, which prohibits sending "by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character".
(15) The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has buried that obscene version of history by convicting Bagosora of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes – and, in the process, establishing that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was neither accidental nor spontaneous.
(16) He included the text of an email sent to the National Gallery of Victoria’s curatorial team on 12 September saying any work using the pieces could not “contain any political, religious, racist, obscene or defaming statements”.
(17) Can you still read and do the things you want?’ And he said that since he’d had his child, he had more time because it made him stronger, more concentrated, more serious.’” We discuss how the word “feminism” was considered an obscenity during their trial.
(18) Club leaders, who argue that a wife should serve as a "good sex worker" and a "whore" to her husband, showed the book to journalists last month in an effort to dispel what they called misconceptions that it was obscene and demeaning to women.
(19) The district judge Elizabeth Roscoe found Nunn guilty of sending indecent, obscene or menacing messages following a trial at City of London magistrates court this month, and jailed him on Monday.
(20) • Outrages by Naomi Wolf Naomi Wolf follows Vagina with an examination of the 1857 Obscene Publications Act – the first law to ban the sale of obscene materials.