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"Dumpster fire" is an informal term in the United States used to describe a catastrophically bad situation. It has appeared in metaphorical form as early as 2003, and picked up traction in 2010 in the world of sports.
Grotesque studies, Michelangelo Since at least the 18th century (in French and German, as well as English), grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, mysterious, magnificent, fantastic, hideous, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or disgusting, and thus is often used to describe weird shapes and distorted forms such as Halloween masks.
Joseph Heller coined the term in his 1961 novel Catch-22, which describes absurd bureaucratic constraints on soldiers in World War II.The term is introduced by the character Doc Daneeka, an army psychiatrist who invokes "Catch-22" to explain why any pilot requesting mental evaluation for insanity—hoping to be found not sane enough to fly and thereby escape dangerous missions—demonstrates ...
The word unpleasantness, which some people use as a synonym of suffering or pain in the broad sense, may refer to the basic affective dimension of pain (its suffering aspect), usually in contrast with the sensory dimension, as for instance in this sentence: "Pain-unpleasantness is often, though not always, closely linked to both the intensity ...
Synonyms often express a nuance of meaning or are used in different registers of speech or writing. Various technical domains may employ synonyms to convey precise technical nuances. Some writers avoid repeating the same word in close proximity, and prefer to use synonyms: this is called elegant variation. Many modern style guides criticize this.
A representation of writer's block by Leonid Pasternak (1862–1945). A writer's block is a non-medical condition, primarily associated with writing, in which an author is either unable to produce new work or experiences a creative slowdown.
In general, crisis is the situation of a "complex system" when the system functions poorly (the system still functions, but does not break down), an immediate decision is necessary to stop the further disintegration of the system, but the causes of the dysfunction are not immediately identified (the causes are so many, or unknown, that it is ...
Tragedy of circumstance: people are born into their situations, and do not choose them; such tragedies explore the consequences of birthrights, particularly but not always for monarchs. (This particular variant of tragedy was the genre's first shift away from stories about characters suffering due to their own faults, but rather due to ...