settings
The Idiot vocabulary
140 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
help & settings
[x]
-
affectation
-
synonyms: ostentation, mummery ???
► definition
Definition:insincere, showy behavior intended to impress others; a contrived, ostentatious display
► uses
Uses:
he often talked to the peasants, which he knew how to do without affectation or condescension,
---
Marty: Now I noticed [...] you've got this cricket bat here. Do you play?
Ian: No. I carry this partly out of...I don't know. Sort of... I suppose... What's the word?
Marty: Affectation?
Ian: Yes. It's a kind of totemistic thing, you know. To be frank, it's come in useful in a couple of situations.
This Is Spin̈al Tap (film) (1984)
---
whose behaviour at least could not be mistaken for the affectation and coquetry of an elegant female.
Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice (1813)
---
Krieger: [laughing maniacally, then stops] ahem... or is that just affected and weird?
Adam Reed. Archer, season 8, Dreamland: Gramery, Halberd! (2017)
---
She spoke quite simply, without any of her usual affectation.
Diana Gabaldon. Outlander (1991)
---
"Better read on without any more beating about the bush," said Gania. "Affectation!" remarked someone else.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Idiot (1887)
---
What I finally realized were affectations—the smoking jacket that he sometimes wore to school and his foreign cigarettes, which were actually his mother's—I thought were evidence of his higher breeding.
Alice Sebold. The Lovely Bones, p.73 (2002)
---
How else to explain the existence of Bernard-Henri Levy, France's most famous writer, a comically affected old geezer who traipses around the world in immaculate white shirts that he wears unbuttoned to the navel as he defends the privileged male's droit de seigneur? This would never happen in America [...].
J. Maarten Troost. Headhunters on My Doorstep, p.98 (2013)
---
one does not often see such a manner: no, on the contrary, affectation, or coldness, or stupid, coarse-minded misapprehension of one’s meaning are the usual rewards of candour.
Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre (1847)
help with search