franticity
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Etymology: From frantic + -ity.
Senses: examples: text: They clambered over fences, waded through ditches, burst, heedless of briars and nettles, recklessly through hedges, and with all the speed and franticity of despair, they urged themselves towards the village, hoping and thinking that there, at least, they should find shelter from what Lord Bacon would have called “wild justice.”
ref: 1842, [James Malcolm Rymer], chapter LXVIII, in Phœbe; or, The Miller’s Maid. A Romance of Deep Interest., London: […] E. Lloyd, page 407:
text: The Republicans are reaching out their negro stained hands and welcoming to their embrace everything of the whole country who will swear eternal vengeance upon the Democracy; while their offering are grasped by the Southern American-know-nothing-whigs as eagerly and with the same franticity as drowning men are said to catch at straws.
ref: 1859 May 24, The Daily Delta, volume 1, number 43, New Bern, N.C.:
text: Until therefore aught more substantial than sheer franticity of speech is brought forward, the writer finds it needful to hold to the truth of what he has repeated after other reputables about Darwin’s deathbed.
ref: 1933 September, Moody Monthly, volume XXXIV, number 1, page 6:
text: THOSE WHO reserve week-ends for their artistic franticities also often forget one other important factor—observation.
ref: 1949 August 21, Mary Marquis, “Bad Results Inevitable With Week-End Painting”, in The Arizona Republic, 60th year, number 95, Phoenix, Ariz., section 2, page 2:
text: It reminds me that time is so short and the wonder of the world is so great that I have to suppress a growing hysteria of franticity, which is a feeling of frustration over missing so many of the marvels that are to be seen, smelled, tasted, felt and enjoyed.
ref: 1956 November 10, Don Blanding, “Don Blanding says aloha”, in Hawaiian Life Weekly Magazine (The Saturday Star-Bulletin), page 2:
text: What I say is how the hell would she know or anybody know, male or female, about if it's ever love that first time out or just a concentrated distillation of all the atavistic desires and needs and hungers piling up for years and painful and then being released at last all at once—now!—thank God oh Jesus what a sweet miracle thank you dearest oh oh that felt good so comfortable so com fort able and the tension gone and franticity less and why not.
ref: 1959, Garson Kanin, Blow Up a Storm, New York, N.Y.: Random House, →LCCN, pages 156–157:
text: He once said, much to the amusement of a more confirmed baroque artist, Edith Sitwell, “We must be frantically frontal”—frontality being the most inveterately classical disposition of space and franticity being, let us say, a romantic disposition of soul, the combination or hybrid being baroque, very like Michelangelo’s titanic struggle with deep and flat, open and shut, explicitude and adumbration, all over that ceiling.
ref: 1961, The Prairie Schooner, page 198:
text: We might add to Stewart’s description that our holidays are often celebrated with the same kind of active franticity or passive boredom which characterizes a good deal of what we call leisure time.
ref: 1964, Robert Lee, “From Holy Days to Holidays”, in Religion and Leisure in America: A Study in Four Dimensions, New York, N.Y.; Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, →LCCN, pages 127–128:
text: 3. How can the “rhythm of acting and reflecting, giving and receiving be infused into free time, so that it is not just active franticity or passive boredom, which Big Business is capitalizing on.”
ref: 1968, The Cutting Edge: 43rd Annual Report, 1968, Board of Evangelism and Social Service, the United Church of Canada, Toronto, Ont.: the United Church House, page 24:
text: There are at the outset several ways to communicate poorly. The majestic example is that of the fellow who did not want to alarm his folks because he had broken an arm in intramural foot- ball. He wanted to break the news gently: “I should get the cast off my arm Tuesday, and the doctor says. . . .” That is as far as Mom gets before fainting, calling Dad at work, or calling you at the dorm in the heat of franticity.
ref: 1969 November, Grady Nutt, “When You Need Money or Send a Snap Shot First”, in The Baptist Student, page 34:
text: All this is to say, the franticity of young people may be more a series of efforts to grasp the reality of things than simply to rebel against the adult world, as is often suggested, or to indulge the self with pleasures as has also been thought to be the case.
ref: 1970, Education, page 73:
text: There is, of course, a sort of hysteria or franticity apparent even on the beach; this is a different breed of people.
ref: 1970 September 20, Don Engdahl, “The Beachcomber: Now Los Angeles--Ocean Closed”, in This World (San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle), page 32:
text: This week, the late shoppers will have their day as they throng city streets and shopping centers to pick up the last item in an air of franticity which feeds on itself as the time grows shorter and the selections shrink in proportion.
ref: 1970 December 20, Sam Taylor, “Christmas Spirit Prevails This Week”, in Sunday News, 48th year, number 14, Lancaster, Pa., page 1:
text: There was in the whole piece a sense of enormous frantic hurry that, yes, in some crazy way held the piece together, but also, no, didn’t give things a chance to be heard. This “franticity” may have been augmented by the fact that everybody seemed afraid he wasn’t going to be heard (15 SOLO instruments, says the title page), and the dynamic instructions went out the window - altogether a very noisy result.
ref: 1972 May 24, Jean R. Dane, “Kirchner conducts 15 soloists”, in The Boston Globe, volume 201, number 145, page 20:
text: He had spent the night neither in darkness nor in sleep but in the artificially lit franticity of the canners graveyard shift.
ref: 1973, Imola News, page 12:
text: If we come up with a favorable contract, a pay raise of some sort, a curb on the current franticity which is sweeping management into all sorts of weird programs trying to save money; a contract in which the managers are moved from the never-never land of eternal profits back to the realities of the need for sense and service—if our negotiators achieve a good contract, I am sure a dues increase could be voted in without too much trouble.
ref: 1973, The Postal Record, page 62:
text: Collectively, the fun shops of Westport exude an aura of franticity, of desperation.
ref: 1973, Stephen Birmingham, “Fairfield County: Perilous Preserve”, in The Right Places, Boston, Mass.; Toronto, Ont.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, part two (Where the Money Is Quiet), page 100:
text: There’s a supporting cast which still hasn’t learned that franticity is not the basic tool of the actor — that underplay can be far more effective than scenery chewing and windmill gestures.
ref: 1973 December 12, Sam Taylor, “Sands Is Great In ‘Algernon’: Actor Brings Understanding to Difficult Role on Fulton Stage”, in Lancaster New Era, 96th year, number 29,934, Lancaster, Pa., page 50:
text: Something in the chemistry of the female seems peculiarly adapted to the “franticity” of modern living — if the evidence of widows traveling abroad on the old man’s insurance money provides any yard stick.
ref: 1977 April 24, Del Cato, “Woman — superperson of today”, in Sunday Courier and Press, volume 38, number 17, Evansville, Ind., pages twenty—A:
text: The popular media, political debates and street conversation all reflect mingled anxiety, alarm and franticity to find solutions.
ref: 1983, World Energy Order, 1924-1983, Academic Publications, page 199:
text: How sad today that with all our technology and franticity we move ahead yet are so backward.
ref: 1986 October 26, Marie Sadler, “That Ol’ Rocking Chair Gets Another Rest”, in The Burlington Free Press, 160th year, number 299, page 15A:
text: The famous “thank God it’s Friday” finale trips along with neither the franticity (my word) of Heifetz nor the lethargy of Oistrakh, but that’s more Perlman's business than Barenboim’s.
ref: 1990, American Record Guide, page 22:
text: I got a feeling that / I’d never experienced before / a certain franticity / frantic feeling / like I was running right on the edge / and I don’t know on the edge of what / I was never able to / put that into words very well / but I had the feeling that / almost something’s got to give / Now nothing ever gave / that I can see / things just sort of backed off and eased out / But I was running / sort of like wide open / ninety miles an hour / down a dead-end street / as the song goes
ref: 1991, Journal of Narrative and Life History, page 62:
text: After the franticity of The Farm, the Inspirals and the Wild Pumpkins etc. etc., Brian Eno is just the ticket to change the mood a little and ensure a good night’s rest.
ref: 1992 November 20, The Age, 139th year, number 42,892, page 4:
text: “Behind the gulls comes the water,” he warned. “And the people from the coast. They’re running in various stages of franticity. I’m afraid the earth is disappearing behind them.” He took off his headset and heard distant bullets rattling in the predawn.
ref: 1994, Ben Brooks, “And the Cat, Argyle”, in Bruce Smith, Catherine Gammon, editors, Cape Discovery: The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Anthology, Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: the Sheep Meadow Press, →ISBN, page 251:
text: […]international teams spoken with differing degrees of franticity[…]
ref: 1996 March, Ultimate Future Games, number sixteen:
text: Avoiding the typical herky-jerk and forced franticity of most modern ska, they let old-school Jamaican bluebeat’s tried-and-true flowing rhythms and supple horns provide a solid foundation for their frat-boy lyrical tomfoolery in songs like Super Orgy Porno Party, Surfin’ In Tofino and Kung Fu Master.
ref: 1999 June 18, The Winnipeg Sun, volume 19, number 168, page 45:
text: As the two of them dragged the three of us into the elevator, garbled franticities were whistling about my head like starving vultures.
ref: 2001, Tony Vigorito, Just a Couple of Days, Columbus, Ohio: Bast Books, →ISBN, page 211:
text: PoMo franticity is also evident in the large number of people you see who smoke, despite the spread of no-go zones.
ref: 2001, Jim Davidson, “Parsifal and London”, in Peter Craven, editor, The Best Australian Essays 2001, Black Inc., →ISBN, page 457:
text: Our lives, our institutions—our entire culture is characterized by panic, franticity, and hysteria.
ref: 2006, Albert J. LaChance, chapter 3, in Cultural Addiction: The Greenspirit Guide to Recovery, Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, →ISBN, page 43:
text: When King’s voice first enters – “Girl when I first met you” – we could almost be listening to a better Bros, but he then develops a seamless union between grace (the floating stream of “so strong” in the line “Our love was so strong”) and franticity (the teeth-extracting agony of “feel” in “Now I feel everything’s going wrong,” echoed by the emergence of a high-pitched string synth).
ref: 2011, Marcello Carlin, “Marcel King: Reach For Love”, in The Blue in the Air, Winchester; Washington: Zero Books, →ISBN, page 9:
text: End-to-end stuff ensued, the Navy trying hard not to be sucked in to the Army’s ‘franticity’.
ref: 2012 January, “Jinkin’ Jenkin leads RN to win”, in Navy News, page 47:
text: “Every morning the same franticity and all the cars are bitches.”
ref: 2013, Jessica Hollander, “You Are a Good Girl I Love You”, in In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place, Denton, Tex.: University of North Texas Press, →ISBN, page 2:
text: When the doors opened, Tansie immediately noticed the Brownian-motion of production staff buzzing around the place in a state of middling-to-high franticity.
ref: 2014, Alex Sumner, Taromancer, →ISBN:
text: Within my first week we were all taken to France for the day on a jolly, with fruits de mer and wine a plenty - it was certainly an eye opener and I revelled in the buzz and franticity of the advertising world.
ref: 2017, Sue Wybrow, “Popdance”, in The Little Book of Amazing Business Stories, →ISBN:
text: His ears darted about in equal franticity with his eyes.
ref: 2020, R. D. Arnold, Hero’s Luck, →ISBN:
glosses: The quality of being frantic.
Synonyms: franticness