"Jocosity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Englishman, to think of us as a brutal nation. He was an odd mixture of awkwardness and complacency, a desire to be courteous struggling with a desire to show his independence; he had no ease of manner, no bonhomie, but a gruff and ugly kind of jocosity, which I am sure was not really natural to him, but was his protest against the possibility of my considering him to be shy. He seemed anxious to show that he was as good a man as myself, which I was ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... who is uncommonly glad to see you," John answered, with that feeble jocosity in which we are all apt to indulge when at length a great weight is ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... other at the dancing-classes, and partly because his curly hair and his candid smile compelled sympathy. But her esteem for him had limits. It was astonishing that a family otherwise simply perfect should be content with jocosity when jocosity was so obviously out of place. Were they, then, afraid of being serious?... Edwin Clayhanger was not laughing; he had blushed. Her eyes were fixed on him with the extremest intensity, studying him, careless ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... serious importance is another unpleasant feature. They will talk of divorces as "matrimonial smash-ups," or enumerate them under the caption "Divorce Mill." Murders and fatal accidents are recorded with the same jocosity. Questions of international importance are handled as if the main purpose of the article was to show the writer's power of humour. Serious speeches and even sermons are reported in a vein of flippant jocularity. The same trait often obtrudes into ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... why, there was something horrible in all this jocosity, something that gave me the creeps as always does the sight of a cat playing with a mouse. I felt even then that it foreshadowed terrible things. How could these men know the details of occurrences at which they were not ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... which he had acquired some show of a belly, and his face was round, and his cheeks both red and sleeky. He was, however, in his personalities, chiefly remarkable for two queer and twinkling little eyes, and for a habitual custom of licking his lips whenever he said any thing of pith or jocosity, or thought that he had done so, which was very often the case. In his apparel, as befitted his trade, he wore a suit of snuff-coloured cloth, and a brown round-eared wig, that curled close ...
— The Provost • John Galt |
