contemptibility

I had not had in mind when I spoke the contemptibility of suicide to these people.

It was her only way past her smallness, past the contemptibility of her own resources.

But for such a young man, barely 25, Handcuff Babul had acquired a contemptibility far beyond his years.

Edward Dowden notes that lameness is used symbolically (as in Coriolanus 4.7.7) to indicate weakness or contemptibility.

His daughter fed him on tins of baby food, which again confirmed for me the sour joke of existence and the particular contemptibility of this old man.

He rests his legs on a white-toed, 19th-century elephant's-foot ottoman, taking the measure of the "contemptibility" of President Clinton and other partisan verities.

The programs were meant to provoke, John Rockwell, the festival director, suggested in an introductory note, countering arguments by the music historian Richard Taruskin and others that certain works of this ilk should be shunned for their noxious content or moral contemptibility.