Definition
Jarring is an adjective that describes something that is harsh, shocking, or incongruous, and causes a sudden or unpleasant feeling.
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Excerpts from News Articles
Where were you the first time you read one of Roald Dahl’s stories for adults, and realized he wasn’t quite as sweet and innocuous as he comes off in his children’s books? I had the jarring , ultimately horrifying, experience of reading Switch Bitch when I was 20, barely believing it was written by the same man who’d come up with such beloved tales as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. When you look up this specific book of stories, Switch Bitch, Wikipedia will tell you it is “linked by themes of rape by deception”, and the cover is something you just have to see for yourself.
I love all writing that breaks its traditional form and ventures into something more creative. I see it as an exercise in jarring readers from the monotony of reading writers who’ve been taught — or encouraged — to color within the lines.
Editor's note: Wretched City upon a Hill is a 10-part series examining the clash between America's cherished beliefs about its democracy and the jarring truth about how the system fails in practice.
I am sharing this trip down irrational memory lane because a jarring echo of the “yellow peril” mayhem has gripped the snow-kissed, neurotic country I have, for decades, called home: Canada.
That’s why corporate America’s silence in the wake of the latest mass shooting at a school in Nashville is so jarring . The United States has come to rely on the increasing power of large corporations as political advocates.
But that didn’t make it any less jarring to see the former president and his defense attorney contradict each other about the judge on the same afternoon.
You know, even to your point, I also, when I go out and I see other people wearing masks, I'm wearing a mask. It's a little jarring . And so if you're able to incorporate it with play for younger kids, they see it as not something scary or uncomfortable.
Sometimes, cycling through London as a woman who wears non-cycle gear, I can feel a little bit like a fish on a bicycle or a monkey in a zoo. A spectacle, where I am both marvelled at and taunted. Other examples include a man grumpily saying, “don’t run me over” when I was several metres away from him, and another case of a man saying, “oh beware, a cyclist” super loudly, or jarring comments such as, “do you need help getting up that hill?”
Really jarring turbulence "can impart pretty big loads on the airplane," he says. However, "the design standards of modern aircraft are really high."
It's that claustrophobic inability to find real freedom and the ways in which Hartzman wrestles within it, recreated in the way the band builds heavy, jarring walls of sound that threaten to subsume her entirely, that make Rat Saw God's sound of survival feel distinctly, youthfully, chaotically American. Wednesday may be a North Carolina band, Hartzman writing about her hometown realities, but the depth of Rat Saw God's ache and the ambient, economic and social pressures that fuel its violence and numbness stretch far wider than one ZIP code.
Not only are Stanley and Blanche fighting an epic battle for the love and loyalty of Stella, their battle is also a jarring conflict between Stanley’s mundane, macho world and Blanche’s poetic view—the world by moonlight, the world softened by paper lanterns thrown over harsh lights. “I think [today],” Blanchett says, “an audience looks at the play and thinks about what we lost, that we actually lost those intangible, ephemeral parts. Where’s the poetry in America, where’s the idealism in America?”
But it meant a jarring halt for creators like Shivani Dukhande, who had roughly 45,000 followers at the time the app left Hong Kong.
We’ve also seen the administration consider detaining migrant families who cross the border illegally. That would be a shift from the previous practice of releasing families ahead of court dates while tracking them using ankle bracelets and traceable cellphones. In many of these situations, like the proposed Education Department rule, the administration isn’t fully adopting Republican positions. But the new stances are still jarring compared to the first two years of the administration when the White House was often championing fully progressive policies.
While these Americanised features may sound jarring and unnatural to some, there are many reasons to explain his speech patterns. Of course, we cannot discount personal circumstances. He has a Taiwanese-American partner, and he did a stint of his higher education in the US. The family environment and one’s educational journey are strong factors that influence one’s accent.
From sodden mud to jarring rocks and swollen rivers, Lucas’s quest is fraught with peril, and the constant threat of failure if not death. Yet as Lucas declares: “So much of the divine piles up in me that I cannot die…” Instead he soldiers on, led by taciturn guide Ragnar, played with dismissive stoicism by Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson. While Lucas’s head may be in the clouds, Ragnar is made of earthier stuff and harbours little affection for his clerical companion. It’s clear from the outset that they will come to blows, both mental and physical.
This week was jarring . A former president of the United States made the bad kind of history when he was arraigned in a New York courthouse on Tuesday. It was a lot to digest. It was messy. And it has the potential to truly test our faith in the integrity and longevity of our founding national principles.
When income inequalities become so jarring , and when these inequalities are based in long-term oppression, perhaps the sort of unrest we’re seeing on the streets in 2020 is inevitable.
For many White Americans, this shift was jarring , if not always embraced. After 2014, White Democrats were more likely to espouse the idea that discrimination was a primary driver of the reduced economic status of Black Americans. Republicans largely weren’t. After all, hadn’t the country moved past all of this racism stuff?
An early jarring note was struck by Japan, whose foreign minister Yoshimasa Hayashi will not attend the meeting, Kwatra confirmed. The top Indian diplomat cited the minister’s “domestic compulsions” — he has chosen to take part in parliamentary business back home — despite New Delhi’s “sterling relationship” with Tokyo.
members known and unknown to them, had planted them there. (Brighton was a popular spot for extramarital assignations, and a jarring number of people checked into the Grand Hotel under fake names.) Then someone remembered that, in a separate investigation, the police had stumbled upon a cache of weapons buried in a wooded area.
“There are no signs the [sexually transmitted infections] epidemic is slowing,” Leandro Mena, the director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, said in an interview, describing the new data as “ jarring .”
If you're traveling from Los Angeles, one of the first pieces you encounter is one of the most jarring . It’s called Sleeping Figure , created by L.A.-based Matt Johnson. It’s situated in a strip of arid land south of the freeway, north of busy freight train tracks, with the snow-capped summit of Mt. San Jacinto behind.
Though many of the posts featuring tears and shocked faces can feel performative for virality's sake (it is TikTok, after all), there is something jarring about being able to see a face that hasn't looked back at you in the mirror for some time. Some users have discussed how the filter has kicked up old emotions related to trauma they experienced during those years, while others said it's given trans and non-binary individuals the opportunity to see a younger self that matches with their gender identity.
In what some may view as a tacit rebuke to Downing Street he said the UK “should be working closer” with the Irish government to support Northern Ireland, where power-sharing had collapsed last year. The reference jarred with other statements supportive of Rishi Sunak’s post-Brexit Windsor framework and efforts to revive the Stormont parliament.
Noh said she binged the entire series in one sitting but found the church scenes jarring : With Korean churches being the subject of her research, she couldn’t help but analyze them, instead of simply enjoying the show.
“Even one murder is too many. Regardless of the facts, violent acts like this are jarring to us all,” Jenkins said. “I must point out that reckless and irresponsible statements like those contained in Mr Musk’s tweet, that assumed incorrect circumstances about Mr Lee’s death serve to mislead the world in their perceptions of San Francisco and also negatively impact the pursuit of justice for victims of crime.”
Early in the final season, as Barry fumes behind bars and the show's other characters react to his unmasking and incarceration, the show retains its cheeky balance of absurd humor, jarring violence and bold drama. And there are some sterling performances here – Goldberg's Sally veers from shock to hyperventilation to disappointment as the meaning of Barry's arrest sinks in, while Winkler offers a deft depiction of Gene's towering narcissism, fed by the plaudits he gets for helping catch his former student.
Their mission is laid out flat on Scaring the Hoes' title track, with Brown pantomiming the breathless exploitations of a money-grubbing music executive: "Said it ain't about the bars 'cause it's all about the brand / Say it ain't about the art, 'cause it's all about the fans / Give a f*** about a fan, put the money in my hand." In response, the pair of MCs agree to embrace the pejorative as a challenge, delivering a hyperactive album that is as gratifying as it is overloaded, a truly jarring and yet refreshingly in-your-face display of restorative rap that refuses to go unheard.
Most dazzling to me is how hospitable the narration is. A question recurs throughout the book, an attempt to explain the concept of a multiverse: How many numbers are there between 1 and 2? The book could have been content to launch the reader into thoroughly alien worlds, making a meal of jarring dislocation for art’s sake. Instead, it maps the territory, explains the significance of its paths and monuments, and reveals — almost slyly — glimpses of how they relate to the narrator’s history, before ending the story where it began: on a campus in Lagos.
There are many different “temperatures” of white light, and differences are jarring to the eye – use the same colour-temperature lightbulbs throughout a room. Warmer white is more relaxing, while cooler whites enhance productivity. 6000K is similar to daylight at midday, while 2000K is a warm yellow/orange similar to sunset, firelight or candlelight. I recommend extra-warm white (2700K) for living and bedrooms, warm white (3000K) for kitchens and natural/cool white (4000K) for home offices.
The 55-year-old rapper said that while he's attended countless NBA games throughout his lifetime and has always prided himself on professionalism, Saturday's experience was " jarring ."
The history led Rubenstein to the waterfront at Charleston, S.C., where Christopher Gadsden — who designed the flag in 1775 — owned the wharf where thousands of people forcibly taken from Africa were brought to be enslaved. From its origins as a symbol of America on the high seas, the flag has taken on different meanings to different people. Violent footage of Jan. 6, 2021, with insurrectionists carrying the yellow flags as they stormed the U.S. Capitol, makes a jarring contrast in the episode with a group of U.S. soldiers who rallied around the flag in Afghanistan.
Kristoffer Borgli’s body-horror satire has had some enthusiastic reviews since it premiered at Cannes last year; I found the Norwegian film unsubtle and unrewarding, exhaustingly implausible on a basic realist level, and containing a jarring obviousness which makes its supposed commentary on society and celebrity all but valueless.
That’s Succession-inspired speculation – titillating, no doubt, but not grounded in much fact. The reality, as documents show, is that the patriarch Rupert was still executive chairman, not just of Fox Corporation but of Fox News, and he has always disliked Trumpism. Trump’s protectionism and posturing about building walls and banning Muslims jarred with Mudoch’s free-market instincts. In next year’s presidential election, Murdoch would much prefer Ron DeSantis to be the Republican nominee. According to Vanity Fair, in 2020, before the election, Murdoch promised DeSantis that Fox would support him in 2024.
But Row weaves all the threads together masterfully; sections flow into one another in a way that's seamless. The switches in perspective and prose style are never jarring except when they need to be, and Row's use of language is surprising, at times, and unfailingly beautiful: "America is dead," he writes. "That isn't the right way to say it.