All 12 Uses of
cunning
in
The Lords of Discipline
- He had an extravagant, pulpy nose, stiff, white-thatched hair, sad but cunning brown eyes the color of his cigars, and a great shovel of a mouth with dark uneven teeth that looked as though he could strip-mine a valley or graze in a field of quartz.†
Chpt 1.1cunning = good at achieving goals through cleverness and deception
- At last, they wanted to measure for themselves the mystique and cunning weight of the plebe system.†
Chpt 1.7
- The whole construct of my universe was a cunning, entangled network of lies.†
Chpt 1.10
- His complexion was oily and barnacled with pimples, as though his very flesh was marked with his cunning debasement.†
Chpt 1.12
- I reeled sideways but fell into the cunning, waiting shout of another, and he screamed me back to the other one.†
Chpt 2.16 *
- Newman had the thin, cunning face of a mongrel with a complexion so white and sallow that his skin looked like the crust of a Camembert.†
Chpt 2.16
- I was young then, and my youth permitted me to believe that I could change the world if only I could devise a cunning enough strategy.†
Chpt 3.22
- This would be a magic child, inspirited with the wisdom and cunning of sea life—and none of the old silent rancor of Charleston.†
Chpt 3.29
- But he had learned all that he would ever need to learn about other small men with good eyes, good hands, instinctive cunning, and set shots far deadlier than his.†
Chpt 3.30
- A light fog dusted the beach and the air was completely still, as though the earth and the water were thickening around me, trapping me cunningly in the thickness.†
Chpt 4.38cunningly = in a manner that is clever and typically that includes tricking others
- I had no right to forfeit any votes for my roommate because of some perverse psychic hunger to illustrate the cunning of my wit.†
Chpt 4.41cunning = good at achieving goals through cleverness and deception
- It sets you up with the banality of common events, camouflages the danger signals, positions you with kind and mothering hands, whispers graceful cadences and cunning lullabies, and leads you blithely to terrifying reckoning, perhaps to extinction, but always to banality again.†
Chpt 4.46
Definitions:
-
(1)
(cunning as in: a cunning thief) being good at achieving goals through cleverness -- and typically through deception as well (tricking others)
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
At one time, cunning was also used as a synonym for cute.