scabrousness


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scab·rous

(skăb′rəs, skā′brəs)
adj.
1. Having or covered with scales or small projections and rough to the touch: a scabrous scar; a plant with scabrous leaves.
2. Dealing with scandalous or salacious material: a scabrous novel.
[Late Latin scabrōsus, from scaber, scabr-, scurfy.]
scab′rous·ly adv.
scab′rous·ness n.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive ?
Of the three Jameses, Boswell showed the greatest tendency to Rowlandsonian scabrousness in his drawings, and all had a taste for the absurd, which occasionally veered towards whimsy: their 1936 calendar declared them 'A Triple Alliance against the Absurdities and Hypocrisies of the Existing Scheme of Things whose Shameless Intention is to Pillory and never to Please'.
Conservative in art radical in politics
(30) The utterances of Ajax achieve neither the intensity nor the scabrousness of Thersites' proto-excremental speech.
The backward voice of Coriol-anus
Truth to tell, the level of scabrousness at which "American Buffalo" operates is what one misses from Pepe's surprisingly shallow account of three men inhabiting a junk shop who constitute so much human debris themselves.
AMERICAN BUFFALO