Joseph Lee believes that a certain somberness is essential to Korean writing.
I suppressed an occasional laugh in the face of Smith's somberness: as with the Catholic priests of my childhood, her piety provokes my irreverence.
Respect for all human life, no matter how vile a particular life may be, requires a measure of somberness on this anniversary of the American commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
It did go on, but with a mixture of somberness and party-business-as-usual glitz that made for some incongruous scenes.
"In this book, this grimpendium, are more than 120 entries covering some 250 sites, attractions and artifacts related to the macabre and the grim," he writes, "in some way that I hope will inspire the entire gamut of emotional reactions toward death, somberness, sadness, terror, hatred, grief and uproarious laughter".
Mr. Lee does nothing to help Mr. Tyson set up these should-be-poignant moments; they materialize without warning in the midst of the otherwise jaunty, lighthearted, profane narrative, and the audience is supposed to adopt instant somberness.
The almost lurid colors of the statues take a little getting used to if you have grown up on notions of Puritan somberness, and the general splendor of the little church is an important clue to the Pilgrims.
This time her spare, formal vision is tinged with somberness.
The leather lunch bag the designer Raf Simons sent out was the element many people picked up on, but it's the boxy volumes, the jacket proportions — high armholes and narrow chests that seem oddly to add width at the hips — and the somberness of a color range as varied as a bag of coal that are likely to prove influential in a season in need of some edge.
This grief, of course, was fully provoked by the somberness of her diagnosis — to not grieve would have been bizarre in these circumstances — but she recognized something troubling in her own reaction and begged for help.
He worried that his somberness would disrupt the upbeat atmosphere surrounding a team that sensed its potential to compete for a championship.
