"Healing Heartburn," by digestive diseases specialists at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, covers the symptoms, treatment and complications of what the authors admit is a misnomer, because the familiar discomfort of "heartburn" has nothing to do with the heart.
Ms. Vogelstein has written the play with a keen carrot-and-stick pacing that successfully seduces the audience down a path of considerable resistance, from the comedy of familiar discomfort down into the macabre.
One feels the successful writer's familiar discomfort with a public persona; unlike Ted Hughes, a shopkeeper's son born in the nearby village of Mytholmroyd, Armitage has always retained an unbuttoned and public affection for the ordinariness of his roots, neither mythologising it nor pretending it doesn't exist.
It's no cake walk, but if you've trained hard you'll be ready for the familiar discomfort.
Swollen lymph nodes are an all-too-familiar discomfort during cold and flu season.
The teen's obvious discomfort belies a discomfort familiar to anyone attempting to mute their class background – but the American version doesn't bother with this.
He equates Jack's struggle against the confines of the familiar with his own discomfort as a rock musician.
There is a familiar frisson of voyeuristic discomfort when she first presents herself in the professor's study, squirming and scornful and standing on her dignity, while the great man assesses her with the supercilious disdain of a talent-show judge.
Gaiman does this so well, and nowhere better than in Coraline: he makes the comfortable writhe in discomfort, the familiar forced into the frame of its opposite.
We've all done it: "You have no idea how hard this is!" "Nobody understands my pain!" The truth is, at least initially, most people prefer the comfort of a familiar negative to the discomfort of a positive change, however promising.
