Definition of "brittleness"

[David] Riesman did his best, in prefaces to two subsequent editions of the book (at great length in 1961, and, with some brittleness about having to do it once more, in 1969), to correct this reading—to insist that he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there's even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus.

2013 May 7, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “Yelp and the Wisdom of "The Lonely Crowd"”, in The New Yorker‎, New York, N.Y.: Condé Nast Publications, archived from the original on 2023-08-03

These vignettes often have the flavor of case studies, with interlocking themes related to the brittleness of the body and the complicated work of mourning.

2018 August 14, Parul Sehgal, “Fables Leap Back and Forth Through Time in ’Flights’”, in The New York Times‎, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, archived from the original on 2023-04-11

In Scotland, the Tay [bridge] fell (in part) as textbook testament to the brittleness of cast iron.

2022 July 27, Dr Joseph Brennan, “Bridge disasters that spanned an Empire”, in RAIL, number 962, page 58