WordWealth: asperity

as·per·i·ty , n., pl. -ties.

The separation wave probes all the rocks in its path, moving forward until it hits another asperity or fault bend, whereupon it abruptly stops. —— Sandra Blakeslee, 'Quake Theory Attacks Prevailing Wisdom On How Faults Slip and Slide'; New York Times, April 14, 1992

Many years later, when I was sketching in Rome, a grim-looking Englishwoman came up to me and said with some asperity, "I see you are painting MY view." —— Lord Berners, 'A Distant Prospect'

"Oh, no," Trevor-Roper told me with great asperity. "Hitler was convinced of his own rectitude." (It was striking to see this formulation echoed by a Muslim in Hamburg who defended the motives of the September 11 suicide bombers: "Those who did this had to be convinced they were right," he told Joseph Lelyveld, of The New York Times.) Hitler, Trevor-Roper maintained, didn't think he was doing wrong; he thought he was doing right, doing good. In his own mind he was an idealist. Hitler frequently compared himself to heroic medical scientists like Pasteur and Koch: the Jews were a "racial bacillus"; he was a germ fighter; extermination was a medical measure to stamp out a plague threatening all that was good. That he was dreadfully wrong in this conviction does not of necessity mean that he was knowingly wrong. This is Hitler as true believer—Hitler as Osama bin Laden.  —— Ron Rosenbaum; 'Degrees of Evil'; Some thoughts on Hitler, bin Laden, and the hierarchy of wickedness; the Atlantic; February 2002

She spoke with great authority, with an asperity that didn't allow for sentimental accountings or ideological projections. —— Daphne Merkin, 'A Passion for Order'; New York Times, November 17, 1996, Sunday

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