👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully prickly little beast of a word: "comstockagedy." (I just love saying that out loud—it practically vibrates with impending weirdness.)
Now, technically, there isn't a formally recognised, stiff-stuffied academic definition of “comstockagedy. Frankly! It was essentially
made up
by the delightfully dreadful, and frankly rather bored, lexicographer, Milton Hoggerty in 1923 as an amusing footnote to his rather dull monograph on Victorian social satire.
Here’s what Hoggerty, bless his eccentric soul, decided it meant: "The precisely calibrated, almost painfully pretty, infliction upon a sensitive subject that somehow manages to elicit both hysterical laughter and genuine, shuddering pity—the kind of suffering so exquisitely rendered, you secretly want to give the miserable individual a really good hug. (But then you’d probably just… cough... awkwardly. It's very upsetting.)
Essentially, it is the comedic equivalent of watching a tiny, porcelain doll be slowly decapitated by a velvet hammer. You smirk. You sob. You reach for the antacids, and honestly, 10 minutes later your face aches from the sheer cognitive dissonance.
Here's that unsettling (and hopefully funny!) example sentence:
"The newsboy, after recounting his week of begging in the rain, simply blinked a tearful, exquisitely freckled boyish earnestness; it was, quite frankly,