English

Noun

mordancy ‎(plural mordancies)

1. The state or quality of being mordant.
   • 2007 February 16, “The Treatment”, in Chicago Reader:

     Despite their name--and the name of their record--any morbidity or malice the Ships harbor is aggressively sublimated into relentlessly upbeat, largely staccato indie pop, with just a tinge of mordancy in the lyrics and the lap steel (which they underutilize criminally).

   • 1995 August 4, Bill Wyman, “Son Volt”, in Chicago Reader:

     But its overall feel is a stark and regretful one, with sentimentality ("Catching an all-night station / Somewhere in Louisiana / Sounds like 1963 / But for now it sounds like heaven") vying for dominance with mordancy ("Driving down sunny 44 highway / There's a beach there known for cancer").

   • 1912, Cornelius Weygandt, Irish Plays and Playwrights:

     And yet this joy that is basic in Synge, this exaltation, is no more basic than emotions and attitudes of mind that are often, in other men, at war with joy and exaltation--irony and grotesquerie, keen insight into "the black thoughts of men," and insistent awareness of the quick passing of all good things, diablerie and mordancy.