All 5 Uses
cynical
in
The Shining
(Auto-generated)
- Danny is doing subconsciously what these so-called mystics and mind readers do quite consciously and cynically.†
Chpt 3 *
- Little Margery, who had specialized in sweet seven-year-olds who saved marriages and the lives of dogs unjustly accused of killing chickens, had been given the biggest Hollywood funeral in history by Top Mark — the official story was that Little Margery had contracted a "wasting disease" while entertaining at a New York orphanage — and some cynics suggested the studio had laid out all that long green because it knew it was burying itself.†
Chpt 3cynics = people who expect the worst -- especially of people (such as expecting them to be selfish and lie)
- Originally conceived as a bright boy more cursed with money than blessed with it, a boy who wanted more than anything to compile a good record so he could go to a good university because he had earned admission and not because his father had pulled strings, he had become to Jack a kind of simpering Goody Two-shoes, a postulant before the altar of knowledge rather than a sincere acolyte, an outward paragon of Boy Scout virtues, inwardly cynical, filled not with real brilliance (as he had first been conceived) but only with sly animal cunning.†
Chpt 4
- Now he tended more and more to see Denker as a Mr. Chips figure, and the tragedy was not the intellectual racking of Gary Benson but rather the destruction of a kindly old teacher and headmaster unable to see through the cynical wiles of this monster masquerading as a boy.†
Chpt 4
- He strained harder and harder, scared now, part of him cynically thinking that everyone else was simply putting on to please Sister Beatrice, part of him secretly convinced that he wasn't seeing it because God had decided he was the worst sinner in the class.†
Chpt 4
Definitions:
-
(1)
(cynical) someone who expects the worst -- especially of people (such as expecting them to be selfish and lie)
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)