arrant ˈa-rənt , ˈer-ənt adjective
: without qualification; used informally as (often pejorative) intensifiers
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The word arrant has appeared in two articles on NYTimes.com in the past two years, including on December 3, 2019 in “Brian Doyle Noticed the Little Things. His Book Reminds Us We Should Too” by Margaret Renkl:
If you are in love with language, here is how you will read Brian Doyle’s posthumous collection of essays: by underlining sentences and double-underlining other sentences; by sometimes shading in the space between the two sets of lines so as to create a kind of D.I.Y. bolded font; by marking whole astonishing paragraphs with a squiggly line in the margin, and by highlighting many of those squiggle-marked sections with a star to identify the best of the astonishing lines therein; by circling particularly original or apt phrases, like “this blistering perfect terrible world” and “the chalky exhausted shiver of my soul” and “the most arrant glib foolish nonsense and frippery”; and, finally, by dog-earing whole pages, and then whole essays, because there is not enough ink in the world to do justice to such annotations, slim as this book is and so full of white space, too.
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