The light stung my eyes, and the alcohol whispered in my blood.
"I used to have a sign by my desk: 'Be light, stinging, insolent, and melancholy,' " wrote Kenneth Tynan in his journals (which were excerpted in The New Yorker).
The diaries have been edited by John Lahr, who claims they illustrate Tynan's motto "Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"; as Tynan himself saw, it was melancholy that predominated.
You may experience some tingling or light stinging after using the oil, but that is most likely due to the anti-bacterial agents at work.
Mr. Vidal can turn a heavy notion light and stinging.
What's lost is what's essential: Hughes's voice — quick, light, sometimes stinging — and the cadences of his poems.
The first, or 2am draft, is written in a tone of light-hearted, stinging, supercilious irony: "Much though I enjoyed Mr X's lively cabaret turn, of which my book was the ostensible subject, I did think that I might correct a few of the more egregious errors he made in the course of his caperings…".
A few of my friends did get light, little stings that they said were no big deal, certainly not worth missing the lake in order to avoid.
In bringing Nick and Honey's shame into the light, George robs it of its power to sting.
The home nation did him a favour by taking the sting out of the night with the artificial light show they put on to engineer a spectacle.
