miserlily

English

Etymology

From miserly +‎ -ly.

Adverb

miserlily (comparative more miserlily, superlative most miserlily)

1. In a miserly manner.
   • 1851, Gregory Seaworthy [pseudonym; George H. Throop], “The Fishery”, in Bertie: or, Life in the Old Field. A Humorous Novel., Philadelphia, Pa.: A. Hart, late Carey and Hart, page 86:

     I would be seated so cozily by your side, with Molly (kiss her for me, won’t you ?) on my knee, while we would chat, and laugh, and miserlily count over our hoards of pleasant memories.

   • 1961 April 1–3, John Fowles, “Childlessness”, in Charles Drazin, editor, The Journals, volumes I (1949–1965), New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, published 2005, →ISBN, page 459:

     At Leigh. Alone with them. Angel in France. It rained most of the time. It bores me terribly, being with them. The absolute empty dryness of such an existence. We seize on the little felicities – M’s cooking, F’s sporadic culture and old man’s endearingness. But the deadness at the heart of things. They shuffle through life now, subsisting mainly on television and gossip; gossip gone over and over again, miserlily.

   • 1962, Joges Chandra Ghose, Whither Bound are We?, Satya Charan Sarkar, page 318:

     Jajan means to serve one’s neighbours and elate them. We serve but miserlily our environment nowadays, and the whole country goes on like that. Big men tell us to be charitable, but we need impulse from within for works of charity. That is why jawjan is so important. It is the basis of jajan. And that is why we prefer jajaks, adharjus, and ritwiks to lead us in works of public service.

   • 1963 May, Raymond Postgate, “About Scotch Whisky”, in Holiday, volume 33, number 5, The Curtis Publishing Company, page 106:

     All the same, nobody can prevent us looking round the various malt distilleries which give the individual tastes which we sometimes can recognize in the blended bottles, and even on occasion and by favor (for the great blenders leave very few “single” whiskies for the connoisseur) picking up a lone bottle for evening sampling with chosen friends. This you will hoard, and treat as carefully as you would an authentically old fine champagne from Cognac—certainly, you will dole it out far more miserlily than you would any of the commercial liqueurs.

   • 1968, Howard C[harles] Brashers, “Character and Characterization: II”, in Creative Writing: Fiction, Drama, Poetry and the Essay, D. Van Nostrand Company, →ISBN, page 133:

     He published his dissertation and two text-books, and then began writing a continuing series of rather brilliant little monographs on a variety of subjects. They were short, incisive, novel contributions to learning, and, when graduate students began having to buy them, he became moderately and miserlily wealthy.

   • 1990, Tim Parks, Juggling the Stars, New York, N.Y.: Grove Press, published 1993, page 89:

     “Oh Morri, if only everything didn’t cost so much!” And the happier she became, the harder and more irritating it was to have to explain that he had the runs and that that was why he kept popping into all these cafés, so as to empty himself over their filthy insanitary holes in the ground. It was her fault (he had an itch now too) for the godawful diet she was miserlily insisting on; but she laughed and said he should learn to see the funny side of things.

   • 2012, Andrey Platonov, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler, Happy Moscow, London: Vintage Books, published 2013, →ISBN, page 44:

     Investigating more precisely, speculating almost uninterruptedly, Sambikin was coming to suppose that at the moment of death some kind of mysterious sluice opens in the human body, and that from this sluice there flows through the organism a special moisture which poisons the pus of death and washes away the ash of exhaustion, and which is carefully preserved all through life, up until the supreme danger. But where in the darkness, in the bodily ravines of a human being, is this sluice that faithfully and miserlily preserves the last charge of life?