Detestability

Benjamin Latrobe, the “Father of American Architecture” who designed the U.S. Capitol, saw whites performing the Virginia Jig and called it “the excess of detestability.” ❋ Thaddeus Russell (2010)

Oh, well I'm certainly not suggesting an objective standard of detestability. ❋ SVGL (2009)

Welsh Wales to English London, and gives us in _My Neighbours_ (MELROSE) a further collection of sketches pleasantly calculated to prove that the general detestability of his compatriots remains unchanged by their migration from a whitewashed cottage to a villa in Suburbia. ❋ Various (N/A)

_Keeling's_ wife is worthy of a place in the author's long gallery of woolly-witted matrons; while in _Silverdale_ he has given a study of clerical futility and egotism almost savage in its detestability, a portrait at which one laughs and shudders together. ❋ Various (N/A)

These horrors were mentioned in the order of their detestability, and with a rising accent. ❋ A. Ethelwyn Wetherald (1898)

Nevertheless it is plausibly urged that, as young ladies (_Mädchen_) are, to mankind, precisely the most delightful in those years; so young gentlemen (_Bübchen_) do then attain their maximum of detestability. ❋ Thomas Carlyle (1838)

No glory discernable; not even terror: at best, detestability, ill-matched with despicability! ❋ Thomas Carlyle (1838)

All the King's Men let its protagonist, a charismatic and power hungry politician who loses all restraint, grow into his detestability, and Willy Stark devolves into the mire of corruption gracelessly. ❋ Unknown (2008)

With Bush and company in the Nixonian zone of detestability, the Bushies tell us really it’s God, history, or Gen. David Petraeus — anything that will keep the Bush regime from being cast as the voice of its own administration — that now decides. ❋ Unknown (2007)

Charles Lamb used to say); a flayed horse's head without the spiritualism, good or bad, -- and simply figures on my mind as a detestability; which I had much rather never have seen. ❋ Thomas Carlyle (1838)