All 8 Uses of
askew
in
The Magic Mountain
- He was a bony man, a good three heads taller than Dr. Krokowski, with a shock of white hair; his neck vertebrae stuck out, and his watery, bloodshot blue eyes protruded; he had a snub nose above a little short-cropped moustache, which sat slightly askew because his upper lip was turned up at one comer.†
Chpt 3.2askew = not straight; or not right
- And he laughed, which set his upper lip and short-cropped moustache a little more askew.†
Chpt 5.2 *
- There was too much red in the face, the nose was very badly drawn, the hair color was wrong, almost that of straw, the mouth was askew; the special fascination of her features had not been brought out, was not even apparent, but only coarsened by exaggeration.†
Chpt 5.6
- He was seated between Herr Wehsal and the hunchbacked Mexican, with whom he spoke Spanish—because he was a master of many languages, including Turkish and Hungarian—and folding his gigantic hands before his plate and hitching his moustache more askew, he watched with protruding, bloodshot, blue eyes as Consul Tienappel raised his glass of bordeaux to Frau Redisch at her table.†
Chpt 6.5
- Wehsal had set his jaw askew.†
Chpt 6.6
- ever since Clavdia Chauchat's renewed departure from the society of those up here, including a respectful, considered farewell to her master's surviving "brother" exchanged beneath the shadow cast by the tragedy of a great failure—ever since that turning point, it had seemed to the young man as if there were something uncanny about the world and life, as if there were something peculiar, something increasingly askew and disquieting about it, as if a demon had seized power, an evil and crazed demon, who had long exercised considerable influence, but now declared his lordship with such unrestrained candor that he could instill in you secret terrors, even prompt you to think of fleeing.†
Chpt 7.6
- Wehsal's jaw was set askew.†
Chpt 7.9
- Their flushed, wet faces, splattered with mud, are framed by chin straps and gray cloth-covered helmets worn askew; they are flushed with exertion and the sight of the casualties they took moving through the marshy wood.†
Chpt 7.10
Definitions:
-
(1)
(askew) not straight (not in proper alignment)
or:
(when used figuratively) not right, or not as planned -
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Less commonly, askew is used in the idiom, looked at me askew. It means looked at in a puzzled manner. You could think of it as someone tilting their head to see the person from a different angle.
Rarely, Askew can also refer to someone's first name.