Dictionary

Withnailesque en · ADJ

Etymology

Invented surname Withnail + -esque

Meanings

1. (rare) Reminiscent of Withnail and I (1987), a British black comedy film about two young, unemployed, binge-drinking actors living in a squalid flat in 1960s London.
   • Filled with sharp Cymric wit, Rhinos, Winos and Lunatics is not just an extremely funny book, but a quintessential chronicle of seventies rock that is soon to be immortalised as a feature film. Leonard effortlessly conjures up dozens of Withnailesque anecdotes […] 2008, Stephen E. Andrews, Duncan Bowis, 100 Must-read Books for Men, page 86:
   • And seventy years later the last of Pentonville Road's original arch-windowed townhouses, two-million-quid jobs anywhere else, now wallowed in Withnailesque decay […] 2003, Tim Moore, Do Not Pass Go, page 221:
   • A friendly duo, Sharon Ruston and James Kidd, ushered me into the distinctively Withnailesque student community in Liverpool, as well as the rudiments of the art of surviving in a crowded room where everyone's smoking, chatting, chanting and drinking (often simultaneously) […] 2003, Rocco Coronato, Jonson Versus Bakhtin: Carnival and the Grotesque, page viii:

Forms