Citations:mephitic
English citations of mephitic
Adjective
edit- 1859 January 1, “Olympus and Asgard”, in The Atlantic[1], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Rudimental palms and pines of mushroom growth stood there motionless, sending forth no soft and soul-like murmurs into the lurid reek; for as yet leaves and flowers and blue skies and pure breezes were not,—nothing but whiffs of mephitic and lethal vapor ascending, as from a vast charcoal brazier.
- 1860 September 1, “July Reviewed by September”, in The Atlantic[2], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- "AN unexpected opportunity of personally investigating a highly nauseous kind of mephitic vapor drew me and Jones suddenly hither without time to say farewell or make explanations.
- 1861 January 1, “A Night Under Ground”, in The Atlantic[3], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- For my own part, as my lungs inflate themselves with this pure, dry, bracing air, exquisitely redolent of health, and testifying at once to a total exemption from noxious exhalations or mephitic vapors, I grow têle-montée, rattle-brained; my laugh echoes through these stony chambers, wild snatches of song hover on my lips, odd conceits flit through my brain, I joke, I dash forward with haste; my excitement endows me with a superfeminine self-possession.
- 1862 November 29, The New York Times, “IMPORTANT FROM PORT ROYAL; The Origin, Progress and End of the Yellow Fever. A LIST OF THE DEATHS FROM IT. Another Successful Expedition of Colored Soldiers. A PROJECT FOR A NEW DEPOT.”, in The New York Times[4], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- But the ordinary sanitary precaution in this climate, of raising buildings from the ground and allowing a current of air to pass under them, was not adopted, therefore the Summer heat generated noxious gasses from the decaying roots and animal deposits, which finally becoming impregnated by the mephitic exhalations from the marsh, developed a most virulent type of yellow fever.
- 1864 November 1, Christopher Crowfield, “House and Home Papers: X”, in The Atlantic[5], archived from the original on 2022-04-15:
- A minister gets up in a crowded lecture-room, where the mephitic air almost makes the candles burn blue, and bewails the deadness of the church, — the church the while, drugged by the poisoned air, growing, sleepier and sleepier, though they feel dreadfully wicked for being so.
- 1865 April 1, Jane G. Austin, “Adventures of a Lone Woman”, in The Atlantic[6], archived from the original on 2022-08-11:
- Meantime, what became of the unfortunate women who had no kind companion to purvey for them blankets and pillows from the mephitic sleeping-car, and cups of hot tea from unknown sources, Miselle cannot conjecture.
- 1865 October 28, The New York Times, “Grand Excursion Through the Pennsylvania Oil Regions.; Wonderful Results of American Enterprise. The New Towns and Cities Along the Route. Interesting Facts About their Settlement and Growth. Meadeville, Corry, Titusville, Pithole City, Oil City and Reno. THE FUTURE OF THE OIL TRADE. Early Traditions, Pleasant Episodes, and Prospective Developments. THE PARTY OF EXCURSION. MEADVILLE. CORRY. TITUSVILLE. SCHAFFER. Now again we rise the hill and pass through PLUMER. PITHOLE CITY. OIL CITY. RENO. STATISTICS.”, in The New York Times[7], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Lost in the bewildered maze of thought in which we are, our littleness is suggested by every turn its current takes, and we move along from well to well, regardless of the unctuous slime and mephitic odors of the place, till warned thence by the good-natured workmen who remind us that in this region traveling to strangers is unpleasant, if not dangerous after dark, and that "Connecticut honey," as they call the mud, is uncomfortable bedding.
- 1865 December 18, The New York Times, “CITY NUISANCES.; The Slaughter-Houses of New-York.”, in The New York Times[8], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- It is therefore against this colossal system of abuse that we would direct public sentiment, and urge public action -- a system fraught with the dangers and incongenialities before-mentioned, and with the driving of cattle and other animals through densely crowded streets at all hours, and frequently not only in the most repulsive and indecent condition, but also to the great jeopardy of human life; with the carting, in immense quantities, of every species of offal and mephitic matter produced by the slaughtering process; with the brutal and barbarous transportation of lambs, calves and small animals from ferry-boats and other landings, through the city, in every direction, with the sufferings of these dumb beasts shamefully advertised; with the maintenance of immense piggeries and other unclean receptacles for animal viscera; with tripe-boiling effluvia; with the sickening odors from the glue-making and fat-rendering establishments; and with the thousand and one other concomitants of the iniquitous scheme we expose, all indecorous, all brutalizing, all eminently fit for legislative enactments to involve prompt, vigorous reproof, and perhaps the eradication of the whole monstrous plan and its dependencies.
- 1869 August 1, “The Taillefer Bell-Ringings”, in The Atlantic[9], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- As for the gases which had been supposed by some physicists to rampage in the cellar and agitate the bell-wires, Vanderlyn went through that gloomy region with a lighted candle, and discovered nothing more mephitic than a wine vault.
- 1869 September 1, Mary L. Bissell, Sarah L., “Was Reichenbach Right?”, in The Atlantic[10], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Ponderous engines ripped open the very bowels of the planet, powerful acids noiselessly dissolved its firm foundations, mephitic gases extinguished its nether fires; and thus day after day, year after year, as it seemed to me, the work went on, until at last, suddenly, unexpectedly, as it appeared, to every one, the supreme moment for testing the success of this part of the experiment arrived.
- 1870 June 1, Lynn Linton, “Let Us Be Cheerful”, in The Atlantic[11], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- There are still those who hold that love and fame are but vanity, when all is told, and those who can see a certain gracious little use in vanity itself; those who give in to the worship of sorrow, and those who subscribe to the creed of cheerfulness; those who live always in mephitic vapors valleyborn, and those who dwell on mountain-tops, and breast the broad breezes rejoicing.
- 1871 July 1, John William De Forest, “Kate Beaumont”, in The Atlantic[12], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Even the wide-open doors and windows and chinks and the gaping chimney could not carry off all the mephitic steam generated by this mob of unclean people.
- 1873 July 1, John William De Forest, “Honest John Vane: Part I”, in The Atlantic[13], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- The war of by no means ambrosial words went on until the air of the hall became little less than mephitic, and the leading patriots present had got as hoarse and nearly as black in the face as so many crows.
- 1874 February 1, Robert Dale Owen, “Naples Under the Old Régime: A Chapter of Autobiography”, in The Atlantic[14], archived from the original on 2022-06-26:
- Then there is not only the legendary but the mythological; the lake of Avernus, poisonous with mephitic gases, so that birds flying across it dropped dead into its waves; the entrance by which Ulysses descended to the regions of the dead; and, not far distant, the Elysian Fields, Agrippa connected the waters of Avernus with the sea, drained its marshes, cut down the dark forests on the Avernine hills, sacred to Hecate; and since his day the lake is like any other quiet piece of water, with no hint of infernal entrance, nor of deadly exhalations fatal to the feathered tribe.
- 1875 November 1, Col. George E. Waring Jr., “The Sanitary Drainage of Houses and Towns”, in The Atlantic[15], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- It is, however, hardly less important that there should be such a free circulation of air through the sewer as will prevent the formation of those poisonous, mephitic gases which are especially generated in the absence of a sufficient supply of oxygen.
- 1901 September 15, The New York Times, “TUNNEL AIR IN NEW YORK AND LONDON.”, in The New York Times[16], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- The technical journals of London are deriving a poor quality of satisfaction from the fact that it is not alone in the old tunnels of that city, in which trains are still drawn by locomotives, that travel is made terrible by a mephitic atmosphere.
- 1904 July 1, Arnold Haultain, “The Mystery of Golf”, in The Atlantic[17], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Many a man has to learn how to lend a deaf ear politely to a loquacious friend, or to curb his own tongue when playing with a taciturn one; and probably there is no one but has had on some occasion or other to keep his own temper sweet while the atmosphere about him was mephitic with a surly silence or rent by vituperative abuse.
- 1910 April 1, Mary Johnston, “The Woman's War”, in The Atlantic[18], archived from the original on 2022-12-04:
- Nor could it breathe in this mephitic air.
- 1913 March 1, Ellwood Hendrick, “The Sense of Smell”, in The Atlantic[19], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- We note, too, that dogs which follow the scent closely are likely occasionally to go into a mephitic debauch with a decayed fish or any other substance of similar pungency, to 'clean their scent.' That, after filling the nostrils with agony of that sort, they should find them in better working order is an idea that does not seem reasonable, and yet the method is probably a good one, for the same reason that the Arabs planted flowers of pungent and coarse odor at the entrances to their scented gardens.
- 1934 April 1, The New York Times, “Amateur Spies; SPIES I KNEW. By Marthe McKenna. Illustrated. 266 pp. New York: Robert M. McBride & Co. $2.50.”, in The New York Times[20], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- THE spies Mrs. McKenna knew were very different from those whose mephitic tales writhe through the pages of most books that pretend to open the doors upon spydom, especially international spydom.
- 1936 July 1, Stephen Leacock, “Through a Glass Darkly”, in The Atlantic[21], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- In the darkness lie the mummified bodies of the learnings that were, that perished one by one in the dead mephitic air of scholasticism; of learning that had turned to formalism and lost its meaning, to body and lost its soul, to formula and lost its living force.
- 1937 January 1, Allen H. Wood Jr., “Town Triangle”, in The Atlantic[22], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- They dread the inevitable day when the first steam shovel will belch mephitic smoke across the cat-tails, and destroy a cherished patch of fringed gentians with its clanking jaws — when joe-pye weed, jewelweed, alder, and pine are supplanted by raw, scalped soil and the lengthening skeletons of Construction.
- 1938 March 24, The New York Times, “THE SCREEN IN REVIEW; Gary Cooper Comes a Cropper in 'Bluebeard's Eighth Wife', at the Paramount--'The Crime of Dr. Hallet' Is Shown at the Rialto At the Rialto”, in The New York Times[23], archived from the original on 2021-11-22:
- Lionel PapeNow that there is no more red fever down in Sumatra, thanks to Dr. Ralph Bellamy and his sacrificial young assistant, Dr. John King, the story of how the scourge was finally stamped out can be told and is, with a great deal of mephitic atmosphere and brow??
- 1938 April 1, Albert Jay Nock, “They Broke the Prairie”, in The Atlantic[24], archived from the original on 2022-05-29:
- Whatever its subject may be, straight history needs no bowdlerizing to make it acceptable to a civilized taste, and still less does it need to be stenched up with mephitic fiction.
- 1941 February 1, A. J. N., “George Eliot and John Chapman”, in The Atlantic[25], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- Chapman's diary, tacked on as an addendum to this mephitic yarn, comes to a trifle more than half the book, and is probably unique among diaries in exhibiting not one single item of any conceivable interest to anybody.
- 1944 November 22, The New York Times, “THE SCREEN; ' Dark Waters' a Thriller”, in The New York Times[26], archived from the original on 2019-08-23:
- We won't tell you the monstrous discovery the poor lady makes.As this fear-ridden, flexible female, Merle Oberon is properly distraught, and Thomas Mitchell is deceptively gracious as a mephitic medical man.
- 1948 July 29, The New York Times, “WEST POINT 'OSCAR IS GIVEN TO CADET; Seniors Hold Banquet, Parody of Hollywood, and Josh Man Who Appears in Film”, in The New York Times[27], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- WEST POINT, N.Y., July 28 -- The senior class of the Military Academy staged its first academy award banquet tonight and presented an "Oscar" known locally as a "Dumbjohn" to Cadet John H. Saxon for his "mephitic performance" in support of Alan Ladd and Donna Reed in the coming Paramount film "Beyond Glory."
- 1963 October 29, The New York Times, “Screen: Poland's 'Knife in the Water':Drama Involves Three Persons in a Boat”, in The New York Times[28], archived from the original on 2022-12-17:
- Leon Niemczyk is mephitic and intense as the nasty husband, Zygmunt Malanowicz is dry and droll as the young man and Jolanta Umecka is obligingly attractive and provokingly scornful as the wife.
- 1963 December 23, The New York Times, “Screen: An Italian's Amours in Sweden:Alberto Sordi Stars in 'To Bed' at Baronet”, in The New York Times[29], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- The scenery is snowy and crisp, the music gay, and the mixture of Italian and Swedish dialogue is translated with English subtitles or allowed to pass most cleverly.I suggest this item as a sparkling chaser for some of the recent, mephitic Swedish films.
- 1964 September 21, The New York Times, “'Nothing but a Man' and 'Lilith' Presented”, in The New York Times[30]:
- Anne Meacham is icy and mephitic as the older woman who lures the girl, and Peter Fonda is flat and pathetic as a patient who wants to play David to her Lisa, Kim Hunter, an able actress, meekly
- 1966 September 1, Phoebe Lou Adams, “Potpourri”, in The Atlantic[31], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- Only Mr. Gibbons would attack skunk cabbage, much less battle that mephitic vegetable to a draw, or confess that his orange-lemon-bearberry jam was pronounced very good — probably better without the bearberries.
- 1966 September 29, The New York Times, “The Screen: 'The Bible' According to John Huston Has Premiere:Director Plays Noah in Film at Loew's State Fry's Script Is Limited to Part of Genesis”, in The New York Times[32], archived from the original on 2022-12-25:
- Then, after an intermission, there's a curiously baffling bit about the building of the Tower of Babel, and a lengthy, mephitic episode involving Lot in the city of Sodom and fleeing with his daughters and his wife.The picture ends with the inspirational story of Abraham and Sarah and the terminal cliff-hanging episode of the morbid and aborted sacrifice of Isaac, their son.That's the total range of this huge picture that had its world premiere, after more than four years of creation, at Loew's State last night.
- 1967 November 14, The New York Times, “Screen: 'Fearless Vampire Killers':Baronet Shows Picture Its Author Disowned”, in The New York Times[33], archived from the original on 2022-12-13:
- Alfie Bass is expansive and propitious as the comical proprietor of the inn, and Sharon Tate looks precisely the sort of bat-bait into which you may expect any lurking vampire to sink his teeth.Also the style of the production, which runs to flatulent forms and somber hues, is appropriate to the mephitic spirit of an anticipated black-humored spoof.But, heavens, how bleakly unproductive of wit it is as it goes along, and how sluggishly heavy and obvious are the fumblings towards haunted-house fun.
- 1970 July 19, The New York Times, “A collection of collections of short stories reviewed by James R. Frakes”, in The New York Times[34], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Just about everything is stirred into this mephitic brew: Mayor Daley's neck, Brinkley's half smile, the chilling White Owl commercial, "Psycho," "I Spy," "Run for Your Life," and L. B.
- 1971 June 6, The New York Times, “Summer of '84”, in The New York Times[35], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- That "illusion is the only reality," as Rupert whis pers to Timmie in the mephitic dawn?
- 1973 December 23, The New York Times, “A long nose argued with its owner”, in The New York Times[36], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- The devil is a monster, a fog, a mephitic exhalation brooding over river banks, or an unseen presence that lurks in city streets, lights the lamps of Nevsky Prospect to falsify reality, lives in the portrait of an old usurer, and makes the uncanny so habitual that a nose, arrayed in uniform, may strut about like any ordinary mortal and even have an argument with the
- 1973 December 23, The New York Times, “The strange case of T.W.A. vs. Howard Hughes vs. T.W.A.”, in The New York Times[37], archived from the original on 2020-12-05:
- The endless technical courtroom exchanges that he quotes take on a queer kind of resonance when set in counterpoint to the figure of Hughes, always offstage, never heard or seen, clearly by the reader any more than by the court: a figure to be imagined with wonder and a certain distasteful awe, his body weight at one time reportedly dropping to 97 pounds and his hair growing to his waist, a strange, sequestered, somehow mephitic embodiment of —what?
- 1974 May 19, The New York Times, “Two first novels”, in The New York Times[38], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- An organization‐meeting of a tenants patrol in a mephitic laundry room would have driven the painter George Grosz to despair.
- 1977 March 6, Ron Chernow, “The Silent Springs of Manhattan”, in The New York Times[39], archived from the original on 2022-11-10:
- But that same year, the city fathers cursed the collect as a "stagnant and mephitic" sewer that bred disease and horrible smells.
- 1977 December 1, John Leonard, “Books of The Times”, in The New York Times[40], archived from the original on 2022-04-08:
- The air is incarnadined and made mephitic with their presence."
- 1977 December 25, The New York Times, “Snotgurgles Were Enemies”, in The New York Times[41], archived from the original on 2021-02-26:
- Their main enemies are trolls and snotgurgles—the latter an ugly, mephitic breed of creature of which only two or three exist; trolls and snotgurgles torture gnomes when they catch them.
- 1984 November 11, The New York Times, “IN SHORT”, in The New York Times[42], archived from the original on 2016-03-08:
- The day drags like a mephitic slug across a sticky plank.
- 1986 January 15, The New York Times, “EPIGONES ROAST BUCKLEY WITH HOT AIR BALLOONS”, in The New York Times[43], archived from the original on 2015-05-24:
- Adding a festive note to last night's celebration were balloons printed with some words Mr. Buckley, unlike most people, uses often - such as encephalophonic, stochastic, meiotic, hebdomadal, mephitic, eristic, antonomasia, tergiversation, psephology, energumen, epigone, irenic and maieutic.
- 1986 September 21, Peter Ackroyd, “A KILLER, HAUNTED BY SMELLS”, in The New York Times[44], archived from the original on 2022-04-18:
- In its most fetid spot, beside a mephitic cemetery and beneath a fish stall, the hero of Perfume, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born.
- 1987 November 15, The New York Times, “WELCOME TO MY PHANTASMAGORIA”, in The New York Times[45], archived from the original on 2018-03-03:
- THIS is the sort of book that is often easier to write than to read, but Mr. Irwin, author of the novel The Limits of Vision and The Middle East in the Middle Ages, keeps the mephitic pot boiling.
- 1990 January 21, The New York Times, “KLEIG LIGHTS ON THE POTOMAC”, in The New York Times[46], archived from the original on 2015-09-19:
- He is fond of words like bloviate, mephitic and riparian and also returns with unseemly frequency to dwarf, his conditioned response to screen actors, each tinier than the other, with their regulation dwarf proportions.
- 1998 November 27, Kate Singleton, “The Odoriferous Soul and Pride of a Small Italian Town : The Mighty Formaggio di Fossa”, in The New York Times[47], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Although there are still several independent cheese makers using the pits, nowadays the bulk of the formaggio di fossa is handled by merchants who have understood the curious appeal of such a mephitic gastronomic delicacy.
- 1999 June 26, Guardian Staff, “Therapy ruined your life? Tell me about it...”, in The Guardian[48], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- And then came the Grief Counsellors: the modern equivalent of the eery, pallid, mephitic night cleaners who used to creep around our cities: they emptied the cess from the pits; the Grief Counsellors empty the cess from our souls.
- 2000 October 1, Marisa Bartolucci, “Beyond the Guggenheim Museum lies a many-faceted city worth getting to know”, in The Atlantic[49], archived from the original on 2013-05-23:
- But all that industry turned the air a sooty yellow and the River Nervión, which runs through Bilbao, a mephitic white.
- 2002 January 13, Phil Hogan, “Tolkien 'bout my generation”, in The Guardian[50], archived from the original on 2021-02-11:
- Such excitement, though at this moment I am trying to facilitate ingress to a packet of Skittles and by the time I surface Cate Blanchett is on screen, strolling about a woodland glade flaunting a pair of prosthetic ears and playing a beautiful cursed enchantress, forever doomed by the mephitic powers of Gothvalium to walk with the sun behind her so everyone can see through her dress.
- 2002 March 19, William J. Broad, “For Delphic Oracle, Fumes and Visions”, in The New York Times[51], archived from the original on 2022-11-14:
- The Oxford Classical Dictionary in 1948 voiced the prevailing view: Excavation has rendered improbable the postclassical theory of a chasm with mephitic vapours.
- 2002 April 21, Euan Ferguson, “Advice from travel's front line”, in The Guardian[52], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Addicts in stopover during the 21-hour flight to Australia find, on first arrival at Changi, that there is just one officially designated smoking site, a tiny glass-walled box hideously full of mephitic vapours, its floor awash with stubs; it's enough to put you off smoking (almost).
- 2003 January 5, Sophie Harrison, “The Wrinkle Cure”, in The New York Times[53], archived from the original on 2017-08-28:
- Despite its necessary ambiguity, reviewers responded to Wilde's story with disgust; a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odors of moral and spiritual putrefaction, a critic wrote in The London Daily Chronicle.
- 2003 February 13, Sean Ingle, “West Indies v New Zealand”, in The Guardian[54], archived from the original on 2014-09-10:
- "Sorry to appear dimwitted," he writes, "but what the hell does "mephitic" mean?"
- 2003 March 5, Guardian Staff, “Breakfast, Dinner and Lunch”, in The Guardian[55], archived from the original on 2014-09-10:
- Upon hearing this morning's news of two departures from Manchester City, the Fiver immediately roused its little brother and brand spanking new regional stereotype, Oasis Fiver, from the mephitic Mancunian fug in which he habitually welters.
- 2003 March 31, Guardian Staff, “John Sutherland”, in The Guardian[56], archived from the original on 2022-08-17:
- By the next day, sites such as the aptly-named SharkBlog (hosted by Stefan Sharkansky) were in full mephitic flow.
- 2004 January 3, Alfred Hickling, “Bunker mentality”, in The Guardian[57], archived from the original on 2014-09-12:
- Her last novel, Oyster, traced the implosion of a mysterious cult in the Australian outback and featured a memorable evocation of the foetid atmosphere that settles over remote parts of the author's native Queensland: "a sort of mephitic fog, moistureless and invisible, like an exhalation of the arid earth itself".
- 2004 February 29, Euan Ferguson, “Bogeys, birdies and good libations”, in The Guardian[58], archived from the original on 2014-09-12:
- No matter how bad any aspects of the life I have chosen, they can never equal the mephitic horrors of a life revolving round the Royal Burgess.
- 2004 May 9, Michael Pollak, “F.Y.I.”, in The New York Times[59], archived from the original on 2022-11-09:
- Collect Pond, once a fine pond and favorite fishing resort, was denounced by the city fathers of 1796 as a 'stagnant and mephitic' body of water and was ordered filled in as a measure of public health, Mr. Kieran wrote.
- 2004 July 1, Mark Pilkington, “Deadly miasma”, in The Guardian[60], archived from the original on 2014-09-14:
- But to an 18th century scientist, the answer would have been straightforward - the hospital staff had been struck down by "mephitic vapours" emanating from Ramirez's decaying body.
- 2004 September 26, Mark Kermode, “Welcome to Hell”, in The Guardian[61], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Now the Chapmans are planning to translate this mephitic air to the screen by fulfilling a lifelong ambition to make a horror film.
- 2005 March 20, Fernanda Eberstadt, “'The Angel of Forgetfulness': Migration of Souls”, in The New York Times[62], archived from the original on 2022-06-16:
- "The Angel of Forgetfulness" is written in spicy, incantatory prose, a hybrid of Yiddishisms and Southern Gothic, abounding in words like "maculate," "mephitic" and "oysbrechn."
- 2006 March 12, Nicholas Christopher, “Art of Darkness”, in The New York Times[63], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Surrounded by gloomy forests, it was a mephitic lake, the sulfurous vapors repelling all creatures that might stray near.
- 2006 June 22, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Iraq is a full-scale military balls-up. Our best move now is to cut and run”, in The Guardian[64], archived from the original on 2021-05-09:
- "When it gets tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party's old pattern of cutting and running," Karl Rove, President Bush's Mephistophelean and mephitic adviser, said recently, setting the tone for other Republicans.
- 2006 December 24, Euan Ferguson, “A gift of schadenfreude”, in The Guardian[65], archived from the original on 2014-09-28:
- This happy-day Eve is so boring, you are saying to yourself, and everyone you love seems suddenly somehow to hate you, and another year is almost over and you appear to have done so little with it that if it somehow formed part of the value of a postage stamp it wouldn't reach the neighbours, or get beyond the mouth of the postbox, be spat out pftui by the postbox, and you have bought all the wrong presents, for everyone, and are about to be given the wrong ones too, and your hands feel numb at night, and nothing fits, clothes only sag or strain and food always goes down the wrong way, and you bet you truly don't look good on the dancefloor any more, not that you ever did, and you are about to become, even more than you have always been, a statistic, by fighting with your 'loved' ones over the telly or the food, and it's all grim and mephitic, and then - hurrah!
- 2007 February 15, Gareth McLean, “Watch this”, in The Guardian[66], archived from the original on 2014-10-02:
- Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has been perceived as a hostile, austere place, full of angry mobs and mephitic Ayatollahs.
- 2007 March 11, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth”, in The New York Times[67], archived from the original on 2022-10-05:
- The Bayreuth circle was breeding mephitic ultranationalist ideology well before Hitler, notably through the "scientific" racist theories of another English immigrant, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married Siegfried's sister Eva.
- 2007 March 11, Ben Yagoda, “'When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It'”, in The New York Times[68], archived from the original on 2022-05-15:
- Gore Vidal has been accused of excessive fondness for words like mephitic and riparian.
- 2007 April 12, Harry Pearson, “Hell of the North sums up the cycle of life and death”, in The Guardian[69], archived from the original on 2021-10-03:
- It was a memorable journey, during which I found it hard to decide whether we were more likely to die in a collision with a lamp post or a mephitic fireball of ignited methane.
- 2007 June 1, Rob Smyth, “Football: follow England v Brazil as it happens with our fun minute-by-minute report”, in The Guardian[70], archived from the original on 2014-10-05:
- 38 min "I don't know if I can handle this mephitic excuse for a game for much longer," says Ed Bottomley.
- 2007 September 23, Guardian Staff, “We've been scalded in Bath before”, in The Guardian[71], archived from the original on 2014-10-05:
- From all the architectural sewage which spilled across our country in those years, I might well choose Kingsmead House, the council office block which dominates the area of Bath between the mainline railway station and the old Green Park station, as the single most mephitic stool sample.
- 2008 March 2, Charles Baxter, “The Soul Thief”, in The New York Times[72], archived from the original on 2022-11-29:
- Zoning is a joke; residential housing finds itself next to machine shops and factories for windshield wipers, and, given even the mildest wind, the mephitic air smells of burnt wiring and sweat.
- 2008 March 23, Alex Clark, “After this, nothing was the same”, in The Guardian[73], archived from the original on 2021-06-11:
- As it turned out, their mephitic shtick worked on all ages, turning Kiss's fantasy world into a multi-platform exercise in merchandising that, even today, few bands can rival.
- 2008 April 1, John Crace, “The Butt by Will Self”, in The Guardian[74], archived from the original on 2022-06-19:
- Still, at least there would be plenty of time to display his trademark vocabulary with copious references to discoid hairstyles, mephitic atmosphere, dirndls and arriere-pensees "You OK, right? {...}
- 2008 July 26, Mark Kermode, “DVD review: Funny Games”, in The Guardian[75], archived from the original on 2015-09-16:
- Stylistically, it's hard to fault the mephitic air of growing unease that the director conjures as the unwatchable (and, in crucial sequences, unseen) torture unfolds.
- 2008 August 18, Michael Tomasky, “Does being a jerk work?”, in The Guardian[76], archived from the original on 2021-01-16:
- Alternately a bully and a whiner, and a bald-faced liar to perhaps a greater degree than even George Bush and Dick Cheney, McCain is running a stupid and mephitic campaign that insults even Americans of average intelligence virtually every day.
- 2009 June 5, Nicholas Lezard, “This chimp's a champ”, in The Guardian[77], archived from the original on 2022-05-11:
- A couple of pages further on, and Cheeta is describing Harrison as "universally despised, impotent, alcoholic, cruel, vain, brittle, snobbish and mephitic but still, under that carapace of protective acerbity, [a] very gentle and insecure human being".
- 2009 July 5, Robert Rosenthal, Contributor, “Must Plane Food be Plain Food?”, in HuffPost[78], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Well that mephitic odor is preferable to what I'm now inhaling from my seatmate's UFO (Unidentified Food Odor).
- 2009 October 8, Joe Queenan, “Jack Black and other once-good actors who suck”, in The Guardian[79], archived from the original on 2022-08-15:
- Following in the trail blazed by Bob Hope, Dan Aykroyd and a few others, Black is a sterling example of the actor who starts out seeming like a breath of fresh air, and then turns into something stale, fetid, mephitic, nauseating.
- 2009 October 22, Michael Tomasky, “Report from that other planet Earth”, in The Guardian[80], archived from the original on 2013-09-08:
- Who cares what mephitic effluvium that skunk emits.
- 2010 March 18, Lionel, Contributor, “Olfactory Terror at 36K Feet”, in HuffPost[81], archived from the original on 2020-12-04:
- This mephitic lass was a terrorist.
- 2010 March 18, Robert David Jaffee, Contributor, “Listening to Depression”, in HuffPost[82], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Back in 1997, at the time of my first psychotic break, I lost my appetite, couldn't sleep though I lay in bed all day with my clothes on, couldn't read because of a lack of concentration, smelled differently, the mephitic, sweaty odor of fear, and lost interest in just about everything: a state clinicians refer to as anhedonia.
- 2010 April 13, Gavin Haynes, “One Racist and his Exposed Genitals on a Quest for Justice”, in VICE[83], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- As they patrol the corridors, the burglars are startled to find The Leader, pants around his hefty knees, eyes tight shut, evidently fantasising about making love to one or more of his domestic servants, lost in a mephitic reverie of sweet self-relief.
- 2010 April 13, Gavin Haynes, “JUSTICE FOR TERRE'BLANCHE'S BALLS”, in VICE[84], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- As they patrol the corridors, the burglars are startled to find The Leader, pants around his hefty knees, eyes tight shut, evidently fantasizing about making love to one or more of his domestic servants, lost in a mephitic reverie of sweet self-relief.
- 2010 April 16, Jacob Heilbrunn, Contributor, “Edge of Darkness: Dick Cheney Returns”, in HuffPost[85], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Once again, Cheney, appearing on national television, spewed his mephitic brew of insinuations and allegations about Obama.
- 2010 July 10, Larry Rohter, “Mark Twain's Unexpurgated Autobiography”, in The New York Times[86], archived from the original on 2022-11-29:
- In a passage removed by Paine, Twain excoriates "the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War" and Gen. Leonard Wood's "mephitic record" as governor general in Havana.
- 2010 November 12, Harry Pearson, “Will Andy Carroll prove the difference that destroys the planet?”, in The Guardian[87], archived from the original on 2022-05-16:
- As a result successful sides are like a delicate ecosystem – introduce one rogue element and suddenly a thriving wet pastureland becomes a mephitic swamp.
- 2011 February 2, Dwight Garner, “'Henry's Demons' by Patrick Cockburn and Henry Cockburn”, in The New York Times[88], archived from the original on 2022-07-03:
- Trees began talking to him; he leapt naked into frozen lakes; he soiled his pants on a regular basis; he ate raw garlic; his hair became matted into a single mephitic dreadlock; he roamed the woods, his crotch becoming infested with insects; he began to resemble Jesus or a caveman.
- 2011 March 30, Randeep Ramesh, “Basque country's thriving big society”, in The Guardian[89], archived from the original on 2022-10-13:
- The region's most important city Bilbao, once a mephitic industrial hole, now bristles with civic pride.
- 2011 April 27, Alison Flood, “Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray published”, in The Guardian[90], archived from the original on 2022-12-15:
- The public outcry which followed the novel's appearance – "it is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Decadents – a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction," wrote the Daily Chronicle – forced Wilde to revise the novel still further before it appeared in book form in 1891.
- 2011 July 1, Paul Richardson, “A great white hope in Avilés, Asturias”, in The Guardian[91], archived from the original on 2022-05-18:
- The A66 motorway takes you along the bank of a river that eventually opens into the Cantabrian Sea, but there's no water to be seen through a mephitic landscape of factories and warehouses.
- 2011 July 21, Judy Friedberg, “Cribsheet 21.07.11”, in The Guardian[92], archived from the original on 2022-12-30:
- Mephitic," he declares. {...}
- 2011 July 21, Fielding, “Rupert Murdoch – the Dark Lord in the classroom”, in The Guardian[93], archived from the original on 2020-11-12:
- Mephitic.
- 2011 October 6, Harry Pearson, “Note to England's rugby players: embrace Der Aggro”, in The Guardian[94], archived from the original on 2020-11-27:
- When it comes to the power of a mephitic atmosphere on the training ground, the Germans showed the way forward.
- 2011 November 6, Jennifer Schuessler, “Inside the List”, in The New York Times[95], archived from the original on 2022-06-16:
- Whitehead is in the middle of a cross-country book tour ("Oops I forgot to make a book trailer one unbroken shot of me chewing," he tweeted recently from somewhere near Los Angeles), but don't count on him to show up anytime soon in Connecticut — or, as Mark Spitz calls it, "abominable," "abhorrent," "repulsive," "accursed," "maddening," "loathsome," "mephitic," "despicable," "wretched," "Bad News" Connecticut.
- 2012 March 2, Frances Stonor Saunders, “Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk – review”, in The Guardian[96], archived from the original on 2022-11-09:
- It's not a congenial place, this Cuskland, with its low mephitic cloud of complex melancholia.
- 2012 November 18, John Crace, “Outsider II by Brian Sewell – digested read”, in The Guardian[97], archived from the original on 2022-10-04:
- Not even the vision of Bernard Breslauer's minuscule, mephitic penis being attended to by a swarm of dis-interested amputees, nor my dear friend Jill's clumsy attempts to entice me towards her desiccated vagina, can spoil the memories of such perfect, untroubled times, which ended with the exposure of Anthony Blunt as a Russian spy.
- 2013 March 22, Austin Considine, “Archaeologists in Turkey Discovered an Ancient Gate to Hell”, in VICE[98], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- The Plutonion is really a natural phenomenon, an opening in the earth's crust, like a cave, from which foul and poisonous gasses escaped—also known as "mephitic" gasses (named for the ancient Samnite goddess, Mephitis; common skunks are called Mephitis mephitis).
- 2013 April 16, Jason Linkins, “Westboro Baptist Church Threatens To Picket Funerals Of Those Killed In Boston Marathon Explosions”, in HuffPost[99], archived from the original on 2022-11-08:
- In what has regrettably become an all-too familiar occurrence in America, the virulently mephitic members of the Westboro Baptist Church have announced that they plan to picket the funerals of those killed in yesterday's bombing attack on the Boston Marathon in an apparent attempt to make the actual perpetrators of the attack seem like decent human beings by comparison.
- 2013 September 21, Bethanie Blanchard, “This week in books: Readers in residence, urban explorers, and the Booker prize”, in The Guardian[100], archived from the original on 2015-10-04:
- Their epiphanies are mucky, their metaphysics mephitic.
- 2014 May 16, Pankaj Mishra, “Narendra Modi and the new face of India”, in The Guardian[101], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- A senior American diplomat described him, in cables disclosed by WikiLeaks, as an "insular, distrustful person" who "reigns by fear and intimidation"; his neo-Hindu devotees on Facebook and Twitter continue to render the air mephitic with hate and malice, populating the paranoid world of both have-nots and haves with fresh enemies – "terrorists", "jihadis", "Pakistani agents", "pseudo-secularists", "sickulars", "socialists" and "commies".
- 2014 August 26, Randeep Ramesh, “Rotherham: a putrid scandal perpetuated by a broken system”, in The Guardian[102], archived from the original on 2022-12-13:
- While some of this will be familiar to a British public which has been appalled by the revelations tumbling out of high-profile child abuse cases since 2010, Jay's report lays bare a mephitic hole in Yorkshire.
- 2014 September 30, Sophie Gilbert, “Returning to Auschwitz”, in The Atlantic[103], archived from the original on 2022-11-28:
- "The pieces have started to ferment," Doll acknowledges, describing rotting body parts discarded in a field known as the "spring meadow." Later, he suffers "one of those cloacal dreams that all of us have from time to time—you know, where you seem to turn into a frothing geyser of hot filth." Even further on, he describes the "pieces" as "spitefully massive, uncompromisingly ponderous and unwieldy, mephitic sacs or stinkbombs just raring to explode."
- 2014 October 12, John Crace, “More Fool Me by Stephen Fry – digested read”, in The Guardian[104], archived from the original on 2021-09-18:
- Should I plunge straight into the mephitic swamp of my cocaine years, or should I spend the first 100 pages rehashing the first two volumes of my autobiography?
- 2015 January 30, Priscilla Frank, “Outsider Artist Paul Laffoley Illustrates The End Of The Universe”, in HuffPost[105], archived from the original on 2022-12-05:
- Paul Laffoley, Pickmans Mephitic, 2004.
- 2015 April 13, Noisey Staff, “Gentlemen Are Gentle In Name Only”, in VICE[106], archived from the original on 2022-12-28:
- Melbourne's Gentlemen are a band who seem to wallow in a mephitic grease slick of despair and play the kind of noise punk that was drilling out of the Lower East Side back when it had more sociopaths than socialites.
- 2015 July 30, J Bennett, “Mexican Black Metal OGs Xibalba Itzaes Are Back from the Grave”, in VICE[107], archived from the original on 2021-02-27:
- They were our mephitic black metal cult, and we hail to them on the cover artwork of the first demo.
- 2015 September 20, Randy Kennedy, “Matthew Barney's Most Punishing Tour: 'River of Fundament'”, in The New York Times[108], archived from the original on 2022-11-25:
- The film's story may be Egyptian, but the adjectives it most readily conjures are Latinate: excremental, cloacal, mephitic.
- 2016 January 8, Julie Beck, “Roman Plumbing: Overrated”, in The Atlantic[109], archived from the original on 2022-09-08:
- "They also feared the mephitic gas fires that sometimes burned in sewer holes or in the open seats in public toilets."
- 2016 May 1, Mark Kermode, “Son of Saul review – profoundly, soul-shakingly distressing”, in The Guardian[110], archived from the original on 2022-04-30:
- Within the godless void of his enslaved existence, Saul's desperate search for a rabbi to recite the Mourner's Kaddish over the body of the child – who may or may not be his own (we are never sure and it never matters) – seems to represent an act of atonement, a cleansing ritual amid the stench of the Sonderkommando's mephitic existence.
- 2016 May 5, Peter Ormerod, “The joy of socks - smelly ones, that is”, in The Guardian[111], archived from the original on 2022-05-14:
- Much of the inherent enigma of the sock derives from its mephitic potential.
- 2016 May 8, Euan Ferguson, “The week in TV: Peaky Blinders; Grayson Perry: All Man; Forest, Field & Sky: Art Out of Nature; Veep – review”, in The Guardian[112], archived from the original on 2021-09-17:
- One actually wants to go to what may have been, back then in 1924, the most sulphurous, mephitic place on this black Earth: impossible smokestacks loom and belch, dizzying aqueducts sail the high, dark sky.
- 2017 January 14, Diana Shi, “A One-Weekend Exhibit Clears Up London's Pollution Problem with Art”, in VICE[113], archived from the original on 2022-07-05:
- Breathing Mephitic Air, Wesley Goatley
- 2017 January 22, Nicola Davis, “Bringing a breath of fresh air to the UK's polluted cities”, in The Guardian[114], archived from the original on 2022-12-09:
- Entitled Breathing Mephitic Air, the experience involves a 360° soundscape with three different components of air pollution – nitrogen dioxide, nitric oxide and particles known as PM10s – depicted by different sounds.
- 2017 October 3, Diriye Osman, Contributor, “Juliane Okot Bitek's "100 Days" is a Masterpiece”, in HuffPost[115], archived from the original on 2021-09-20:
- It is this betrayal that Okot Bitek kicks off with, and the first betrayer is the soil in which these seeds of xenophobia have taken root, lending the whole landscape a mephitic dimension.
- 2017 November 25, Sam Jones, “Flags, passion and anger: reporting from a divided Spain”, in The Guardian[116], archived from the original on 2022-12-29:
- But if you can set aside the scenes of riot police dragging voters from polling stations, three trashed Guardia Civil cars, the mephitic online abuse, and the images of fascist flags and hateful salutes, one of the remarkable features of the past few weeks has been the lack of violence.
- 2017 December 6, Noisey Staff, “The 100 Best Albums of 2017”, in VICE[117], archived from the original on 2022-10-07:
- On Caustic, burly vocalist and guitarist Ethan McCarthy rages against racism, corruption, structural inequality, and depression in his imposing roar, laying down juddering, noise-soaked riffs for the rhythm section—drummer Joe Linden and bassist Jonathan Campos—provide mephitic fuel for the blast furnace.
- 2018 February 2, Sam Jones, “After 400 years lost, 'cursed' novel of Spain's imperial age is finally published”, in The Guardian[118], archived from the original on 2022-06-27:
- Its hero ricochets around the Spanish empire, from the high-society fiestas of Lima to the mephitic mines of Potosí, and goes on to witness Sir Francis Drake's attack on Puerto Rico and the sacking of Cádiz.
- 2018 May 24, Steven Poole, “Word of the week: obesogen”, in The Guardian[119], archived from the original on 2022-11-29:
- The substance originally known as "burnt air" or "mephitic air" was christened nitrogen after it was found to be present in nitric acid.
- 2018 May 30, The Learning Network, “Word + Quiz: mephitic”, in The New York Times[120], archived from the original on 2020-11-09:
- The word mephitic has appeared in four articles on nytimes.com in the past seven years, including on Oct. 21, 2011, in the Disunion column "Senator Baker's Waveless Shore" by Louis Masur:
- 2018 June 3, Euan Ferguson, “The week in TV: King Lear; Jonathan Meades on Jargon; The Battle for Britain's Heroes; Peter Kay's Car Share”, in The Guardian[121], archived from the original on 2022-12-03:
- His Edgar was searing, but then again Scott reading aloud Miffy the Bunny Gets New Pink Breeches would make it sound crack'd, mephitic, beseeching, wondrous.
- 2018 September 8, Donna Ferguson, “Forbidden love: the original Dorian Gray revealed, direct from Oscar Wilde's pen”, in The Guardian[122], archived from the original on 2022-07-01:
- The manuscript was originally published in 1890 by a monthly magazine, Lippincott's, and was described by critics at the time as "a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction" and written "for outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys" – a reference to a male brothel where young staff from the General Post Office had been offering out-of-hours "services" to members of the aristocracy.
- 2019 August 15, Arundhati Roy, “Opinion | The Silence Is the Loudest Sound”, in The New York Times[123], archived from the original on 2022-12-23:
- They have preferred instead to keep them in limbo, and stir their anger and understandable bitterness into a mephitic brew with which to fuel India's dangerous and extremely effective nationalistic narrative about Kashmir.
- 2019 November 6, Sophie Gilbert, “Daniel Sloss Shows How Comedians Should Talk About Assault”, in The Atlantic[124], archived from the original on 2022-12-06:
- This section, as is typical in Sloss's shows, is what you might call the "serious part." In his words, if you buy a ticket to watch his comedy, you get 70 to 75 minutes of jokes, "and then I do a sad 15-minute TED Talk." He does this, he explains, because "it does feel disingenuous to not talk about things that are on my mind." And what's been on his mind recently is sexual assault, both as a phenomenon looming over the culture like a mephitic cloud, and as a very real blight on the lives of people he knows and cares about.
- 2020 January 23, Amy Coopes, “Dear Australia, elegy for a summer of loss”, in The Guardian[125], archived from the original on 2020-12-18:
- Venturing out into the eerie still of the morning at sunrise, it could have been winter, a mephitic fug enveloping the town like mist.
- 2020 April 14, Guy Trebay, “We're Holding Tight to Our Good Luck Talismans”, in The New York Times[126], archived from the original on 2022-08-29:
- Like a mephitic vapor from a sword-and-sandals epic, it slips under the door frame and into your head.
- 2020 April 26, Euan Ferguson, “The week in TV: After Life; Gangs of London; Emergence; Have I Got News for You – and more”, in The Guardian[127], archived from the original on 2022-12-08:
- Patriarch Colm Meaney, decades building up his criminal empire, and consolidating it to involve and include the more mephitic likes of Albanians, Pakistanis, Italo-Iranians, whatever, in our capital's melting pot, has been offed, in iffy circumstances, and by a couple of lowlife "pikeys" – their language, not mine.
- 2020 July 27, Ian Sample, “Know sweat: scientists solve mystery behind body odour”, in The Guardian[128], archived from the original on 2020-08-19:
- The work paves the way for more effective deodorants and antiperspirants, the scientists believe, and suggests that humans may have inherited the mephitic microbes from our ancient primate ancestors.
- 2020 August 9, Sam Jones, “Reporting on Covid-19 in Spain: 'The limits of our new normality are being tested'”, in The Guardian[129], archived from the original on 2022-12-18:
- While some have called for unity and cooperation in the face of a common and global enemy, others are only too happy to exploit the pandemic and carry on puffing out clouds of rhetoric that are as mephitic as they are empty.
- 2020 October 1, Charles McGrath, “With His New Mystery Novel, John Banville Kills Off a Pen Name”, in The New York Times[130], archived from the original on 2022-11-13:
- They invariably come laden with words that seem meant to prove his vocabulary is bigger than yours: flocculent, crapulent, caducous, anaglypta, mephitic, velutinous.
- 2020 October 4, Euan Ferguson, “The week in TV: Life; The Comey Rule; Honour; Brave New World – review”, in The Guardian[131], archived from the original on 2022-12-29:
- While Agent Orange may be – no, definitely is, even as we speak – tearing his own country apart, our own PM is not, actually, literally, Adrammelech, mephitic Assyrian commander of hell.
- 2020 October 18, Euan Ferguson, “The week in TV: The Trump Show; White Riot; Drama Out of a Crisis; The Bridge”, in The Guardian[132], archived from the original on 2021-12-05:
- Bannon, if now a little flyblown, still exudes a kind of mephitic energy.
- 2020 November 1, Euan Ferguson, “The week in TV: The Undoing; The Sister; America's War on Abortion – review”, in The Guardian[133], archived from the original on 2022-03-22:
- Kidman has the toughest job, having to inhabit a shell of, mainly, motherdom, without Grant's empathy or Sutherland's mephitic swagger, and pulls this off again of course with immense aplomb.
- 2021 August 24, Richard Sima, “Looks Like Bird Poop. But It's Really a Predatory Spider.”, in The New York Times[134], archived from the original on 2022-11-25:
- The spiders' glossy black-and-white patterning and foul odor are part of a mephitic masquerade that tricks predators that would otherwise seek to eat the spiders — after all, birds tend to avoid ingesting what they have already fully digested.
- 2021 October 8, Damien Gayle, “'It was war': school-run parents tackle petrol crisis traffic chaos”, in The Guardian[135], archived from the original on 2022-09-28:
- Even on a good day the air is acrid, suffused by mephitic fumes belched continuously by traffic on the A109, which bisects this north London neighbourhood.
- 2021 October 21, The New York Times, “Review: 'Ulysses,' by James Joyce”, in The New York Times[136], archived from the original on 2022-12-19:
- He seeks to tell the world of the people that he has encountered in the forty years of sentient existence; to describe their conduct and speech and to analyze their motives, and to relate the effect the "world," sordid, turbulent, disorderly, with mephitic atmosphere engendered by alcohol and the dominant ecclesiasticism of his country, had upon him, an emotional Celt, an egocentric genius, whose chief diversion and keenest pleasure is self-analysis and whose lifelong important occupation has been keeping a notebook in which has been recorded incident encountered and speech heard with photographic accuracy and Boswellian fidelity.