an oppressive quality that is laborious and solemn and lacks grace or fluency; "a book so serious that it sometimes subsided into ponderousness"; "his lectures tend to heaviness and repetition"
making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction; "a pretentious country house"; "a pretentious fraud"; "a pretentious scholarly edition"
marked by repeated turns and bends; "a tortuous road up the mountain"; "winding roads are full of surprises"; "had to steer the car down a twisty track"
art characterized by an incongruous mixture of parts of humans and animals interwoven with plants
distorted and unnatural in shape or size; abnormal and hideous; "tales of grotesque serpents eight fathoms long that churned the seas"; "twisted into monstrous shapes"