acridly

Her eyebrows went up, then she inquired acridly, "Don't you supply anything for no charge?" I knew I'd finally earned my financial stripes when a spirit seemed to commandeer my mouth into calmly replying, "You're breathing it."

Serving up a particularly bleak vision of domestic hell (call it "The Five-Year Itch"), the film excavates more layers of deception, desperation, resentment and homicidal rage than you'd think could exist between two people who were once in love, all in service of an acridly funny punchline: "That's marriage."

Loerke faintly protests: "'That also,' he said in his thin, bitter voice: 'that's the sport.' He was acridly sarcastic" (FWL 1998, 436).