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BRUTALITY
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I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
A brutal barbarous savage act
Synonyms:
barbarism; barbarity; brutality; savagery
Classified under:
Nouns denoting acts or actions
Hypernyms ("brutality" is a kind of...):
atrocity; inhumanity (an act of atrocious cruelty)
Sense 2
Meaning:
The trait of extreme cruelty
Synonyms:
brutality; ferociousness; savagery; viciousness
Classified under:
Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects
Hypernyms ("brutality" is a kind of...):
cruelness; cruelty; harshness (the quality of being cruel and causing tension or annoyance)
Derivation:
brutal ((of persons or their actions) able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering)
Context examples:
A youth passed in solitude, my best years spent under your gentle and feminine fosterage, has so refined the groundwork of my character that I cannot overcome an intense distaste to the usual brutality exercised on board ship: I have never believed it to be necessary, and when I heard of a mariner equally noted for his kindliness of heart and the respect and obedience paid to him by his crew, I felt myself peculiarly fortunate in being able to secure his services.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
I doubted that she had heard, and I resolved to prevent her seeing the brutality I knew would follow the capture of the deserters.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
Temperance, industry, exercise, and cleanliness, are the lessons equally enjoined to the young ones of both sexes: and my master thought it monstrous in us, to give the females a different kind of education from the males, except in some articles of domestic management; whereby, as he truly observed, one half of our natives were good for nothing but bringing children into the world; and to trust the care of our children to such useless animals, he said, was yet a greater instance of brutality.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
And all cursed him and told terrible tales of his brutality.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
He said, “those animals, like other brutes, had their females in common; but in this they differed, that the she Yahoo would admit the males while she was pregnant; and that the hes would quarrel and fight with the females, as fiercely as with each other; both which practices were such degrees of infamous brutality, as no other sensitive creature ever arrived at.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
All powers seemed his, all potentialities—why, then, was he no more than the obscure master of a seal-hunting schooner with a reputation for frightful brutality amongst the men who hunted seals?
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
Brutality had followed brutality, and flaming passions and cold-blooded cruelty had driven men to seek one another’s lives, and to strive to hurt, and maim, and destroy.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
“The earth is as full of brutality as the sea is full of motion. And some men are made sick by the one, and some by the other. That’s the only reason.”
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
I instance this to show the sensitiveness of my nervous organization at the time, and how unused I was to spectacles of brutality.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
I could see their faces, flushed and angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship.
(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)
