How To Use Felicitous In A Sentence

  • Second, the Employment Tribunal's decision should be read generously and not overturned merely because of infelicitous or inappropriate statements which were looking at the matter in the round, of an inessential nature.
  • We were surprised today to learn that Mayor Bloomberg dismissed his hand-picked Schools Chancellor, Cathie Black, after 97 infelicitous days as chief of New York City's school system. Henry J. Stern: Black Thursday
  • Hoping to make up for his infelicitous soup comment, Stan chimes in with his own compliments. The Search
  • This infelicitous parental combination had produced a timid, nervous son whose prognosis for healthy adulthood was poor.
  • After the war, Smith convinced prohibitionists to organize within the infelicitously named Anti-Dramshop Party.
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  • There is little, however, of that rapturous extasy which issues from many a finally most infelicitous husband, some days, weeks, or even months, after the conjugal union. The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Volume 1
  • But on this particular day it seemed as if some of the ingredients were wanting, for the morning and afternoon passed, to the astonishment of all, without a single "phiz" as the girls were wont somewhat felicitously to call the frequent passages of arms in which the two girls considered it their peculiar privilege to indulge. Hollowmell or, A Schoolgirl's Mission
  • Fleda, my dear," said Mrs. Evelyn, with that trembling tone of concealed ecstasy which always set every one of Fleda's nerves a-jarring — "you may tell the gentlemen that they do not always know when they are making an unfelicitous compliment — I never read what poets say about 'briny drops' and 'salt tears', without imagining the heroine immediately to be something like Lot's wife. Queechy, Volume II
  • Yet this very tragedy, in spite of its author's protestations, is nothing more than a rifacimento of Racine's drama, and rather infelicitous at that, though it must be admitted that Mendes' style is of classic purity, and some of his scenes are in a measure characterized by vivacity of action. The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885)
  • You need to handle the delicate matter in a most felicitous manner.
  • To adapt Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase, hockey is one cultural activity through which Canadians are often said to imagine their community.
  • It seems that between Italy and Sicily there is a strait called Faro of Messina, where the tide ebbs and flows every six hours, and the fickleness of lucks tides in Faro where it ebbs and flows every six minutes, furnishes a felicitous illustration of the whimsicalness of the tides of Faro de Messina, and the game may have derived its name from that fact. A Controversy Between "Erskine" and "W. M." on the Practicability of Suppressing Gambling.
  • He insinuates a languor of sun-mist and lustre into his modish Arcadia: a region of roses, felicitously painted, and ruins sketched on his Italian journeys, all against the backdrops of the opera-ballets of his time.
  • No doubt this is a felicitous emendation, though I think it may be fairly objected that a rumourer, being one who deals in what he hears, as opposed to an observer, who reports what he sees, there is a certain inappropriateness in speaking of a rumourer's eyes. Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 A Medium of Inter-communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, etc
  • His play has been an infelicitous concoction of ingenuity and inaccuracy, the latter being generally fatal at this elite level. Times, Sunday Times
  • It accounts for the occasional lapses into infelicitous sentiment, tired phrasing and intrusive personal details that would have appalled the American.
  • The speech of presentation was made by our friend, “Colonel” James S. Norton, in what the rural paragrapher would have described as “the most felicitous effort of his life,” and the wonderful collection was commended to Mr. Larned's grateful preservation by the judgment of Mr. Henry Field, whose own choice selection of paintings is the most valued possession of the Chicago Art Institute. Eugene Field A Study In Heredity And Contradictions
  • I have always felt that I manifest a felicitous combination of his compassion and her boundaries.
  • On reflection the chess metaphor is not a felicitous one.
  • Few are entirely immune, and all that it takes for repossession to take hold is an infelicitous set of circumstances. Times, Sunday Times
  • On top of his last Parliamentary committee appearance, where among other infelicitous comments, Griffin said that he didn't understand his organisation's budget, he has since dropped a clanger on his relationship with the Government.
  • Given the infelicitous effects of other utterances in the play, Titus's vow during this extended ritual does not act as directly or causatively as he thinks it does.
  • In these passages not only is the thought singularly pure and noble, and the expression felicitous, but the actual metre represents almost the high-water mark of the post-Vergilian hexameter. Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal
  • Again, he is often loose and vacillating in the use of the English words he has selected as corresponding to the technical phraseology of the Arabian jurists, and sometimes infelicitous in the selection of his English terms. International Weekly Miscellany - Volume 1, No. 9, August 26, 1850
  • They rely heavily on felicitous coincidence for the plots, and the character development is cartoonish.
  • Several are better written that O'Neill's work, in that the dialogue is neater and more felicitous.
  • The ardor of possessing books, commonly called bibliomania, also styled bibliophilism and "biblio" -- whatever else that has suggested itself to the fruitful imaginations of dozens of felicitous writers upon the subject, -- is described by Dibdin as a "disease which grows with our growth, and strengthens with our strength. Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs
  • Except for the felicitous pretense of deafness I had not tried to pretend anything.
  • Rather, it would seem much more felicitous to use it as a reference book (as the dust jacket itself notes), to be dipped into or browsed again and again.
  • The media men were in equally felicitous mood at the airport press conference which followed the departure ceremonies. WALL GAMES
  • It is true that I judge those Princes unfelicitous who, to assure their state when the multitude is hostile, have to take extraordinary means; for he who has only a few enemies can easily and without great scandals make sure of them, but he who has the general public hostile to him can never make sure of them, and the more cruelty he uses, so much more weak becomes his Principate; so that the best remedy he has is to seek to make the People friendly. Discourses
  • Exploration of linguistic cross-references yields some stylistic delights, such as the felicitously punning chapter title ‘Trojan Whores.’
  • In all candor I must say that she approached closely to a realization of the ideals of a book -- a sixteenmo, if you please, fair to look upon, of clear, clean type, well ordered and well edited, amply margined, neatly bound; a human look whose text, as represented by her disposition and her mind, corresponded felicitously with the comeliness of her exterior. The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
  • Despite the messiness inherent in natural systems, evolution has produced ‘machines of extreme perfection,’ to use Darwin's felicitous phrase.
  • He insinuates a languor of sun-mist and lustre into his modish Arcadia: a region of roses, felicitously painted, and ruins sketched on his Italian journeys, all against the backdrops of the opera-ballets of his time.
  • Fleda my dear," said Mrs. Evelyn, with that trembling tone of concealed ecstasy which always set every one of Fleda's nerves a jarring, -- "you may tell the gentlemen that they do not always know when they are making an unfelicitous compliment -- I never read what poets say about 'briny drops' and 'salt tears' without imagining the heroine immediately to be something like Lot's wife. Queechy
  • We now permit priests to leave the active ministry and remain good Catholics, albeit ‘reduced to the lay state ‘- as infelicitous a phrase as the canonists have ever devised.’
  • Not only does this scene and violence occur at the dinner table, but the line of aggression that begins this infelicitous breach of dinner conduct is "I'll eat you alive, girl! Bess Rowen: Putting the Eat in Theatre
  • Cardinal Newman's axiom, "It is never worth while to call whity-brown white, for the sake of avoiding scandal"; and Father Faber's own felicitous comment on religious "hedgers," "A moderation which consists in taking immoderate liberties with God is hardly what the Americans and Others
  • ‘I think we need ‘Insensitivity Training’ to equip people to get through life without freaking out every time somebody opens their mouth and says something slightly infelicitous.’
  • Well, in one sense there is none, because I do not regard the justification for education as "investment in human capital" in that unfelicitous phrase of the Sixties. Canada's Economy—Can We Advance Back to Reason?
  • In the novels of the period the dilemma was felicitously solved by the discovery, on the last page, that the apparently penniless heroine was really a great heiress.
  • The four disciplines of aquatic sports, namely swimming, water polo, diving and synchronized swimming are infelicitous and poorly represented.
  • It's a sad statement about where public discourse is that, in response to this particularly infelicitous choice of phrase, the defense that is used is, "She has no real idea what any of the words mean. Is Miss America to blame for Sarah Palin's 'blood libel' video?
  • For Rand had already feared this; had recalled the few infelicitous relations, legal and illegal, which were common to the adjoining camp, -- the flagrantly miserable life of the husband of a San Francisco anonyma who lived in style at the Ferry, the shameful carousals and more shameful quarrels of the Frenchman and Mexican woman who "kept house" at "the Crossing," the awful spectacle of the three half-bred Indian children who played before the cabin of a fellow miner and townsman. The Twins of Table Mountain
  • He came to be influenced in this latter pursuit by primitive forms, which rhymed felicitously with those elongated features found in much of his portraiture.
  • Ontologically speaking," he might have mused, "how could conservatism ever really be said to be turbo-charged, as you so infelicitously put it? Buckley, If Not God, Returns to Yale
  • Nationalization is a word which is neither very felicitous nor free from ambiguity.
  • Thus, AngloSaxon corporatism was constrained in two important ways: by an infelicitous social setting and by unresponsive, even antagonistic, state institutions.
  • Despite the messiness inherent in natural systems, evolution has produced ‘machines of extreme perfection,’ to use Darwin's felicitous phrase.
  • I have no real doubt that, despite the infelicitous wording of the passage relied on by the claimants, the committee would have understood the report in the way I have indicated.
  • This is… infelicitous at best, worrisomely revealing at worst.
  • And yet it is full of couch potatoes rolling doobie after doobie and overly felicitous teeth-grinding cokeheads trying frantically to get a word in edgewise.
  • In the first lecture of my freshman economics course at Princeton entitled "The Art of Siffing Among Seasoned Adults," I demonstrate how seasoned adults routinely structure information felicitously (i.e., "sif") to further their own agenda, and I point out that economists can be among the most skillful practitioners of this art. ... Economist's View
  • a felicitous speaker
  • In the second part, I allow my fancy to play lightly with the suggestions this name arouses in me, and I make allusion very felicitously to the famous statue of the Wingless Victory, which the The God of Love
  • He was a powerful man, with a good-humored face, and, in spite of his unfelicitous nickname of Openings in the Old Trail
  • Investment in human capital" - that most unfelicitous phrase-was a concept that I for one argued against rather forcefully, because I believed-and still believe-that education is more than an economic process, more than a means to an end, and more than mere occupational training, but that it is a prerequisite of a civilized society and a process whose intrinsic worth has been demonstrated many times over. Universities: Who Needs Them?
  • Victory is both a felicitous dip of the head and a glorious obeisance towards the changed life that will surely follow it.
  • he chose his words rather infelicitously
  • Instead, he rendered felicitas as "felicitee" which was already available, and he coined a felicitous new word for beatitudo: "wellfulness. Philip Reynolds: The Biblical Definitions Of The Pursuit Of Happiness
  • By an unfelicitous chance she was placed in the same study with Lady When Patty Went to College
  • The President of the British Empire Club of Providence, Rhode Island, Mr. Spencer Over, was the guest of the Club at this meeting and was introduced by President Mitchell in felicitous terms, the members applauding heartily as Mr. Over bowed his thanks. Difficulties and Opportunities of the British Empire
  • Do some decent degree of good and kindness in thy daily life, for the result is a slight pleasurable sense that will seem to warm and delectate thee with felicitous self-laudings; and all that brings thy thoughts to thyself tends to invigorate that central principle by the growth of which thou art to give thyself indefinite life. Septimius Felton, or, the Elixir of Life
  • Well-known as a felicitous writer of amusing features, he was just hitting his stride as a serious and ambitious chronicler of the political convulsions seizing the Islamic world.
  • Conceptually that was quite accurate, even if it was not the most felicitous choice of words.
  • Studying you, I note your limpid gaze, felicitous expression your dazzling waist.
  • If one were to consider the inputs from the existing school system into a child's scientific thinking, felicitous use of language, competence to search for information and to work out solutions, one would find them too little and too late.
  • Somewhat infelicitous and arrhythmic on paper, the pledge is powerful when chanted out loud by thousands.
  • A felicitous mix of fun and entertainment it was.
  • Finally, do not feel unfortunate or infelicitous.
  • Fleda, my dear," said Mrs. Evelyn, with that trembling tone of concealed ecstasy which always set every one of Fleda's nerves a-jarring – "you may tell the gentlemen that they do not always know when they are making an unfelicitous compliment – I never read what poets say about 'briny drops' and 'salt tears', without imagining the heroine immediately to be something like Lot's wife. Queechy
  • This Season has proved far more felicitous than anyone could have expected. WHOLE SECRET LOVE
  • This makes it a happy hunting ground for anyone with the felicitous habit of looking at the lighter side of life.
  • Every scholar and teacher has a list of infelicitous translations which misrepresent or distort the meaning intended by biblical authors.
  • Perhaps, then, we should concede that a better word, a more felicitous description, would have been merely ‘dubious’.
  • The use of the word 'predominately' was not occasional nor infelicitous. Times, Sunday Times
  • By an unfelicitous chance she was placed in the same study with Lady Clara Vere de Vere and When Patty Went to College
  • But if literary language is performative and if a performative utterance is not true or false but felicitous or infelicitous, what does it mean for a literary utterance to be felicitous or infelicitous?
  • It was a smart neologism, I suppose, even if a bit infelicitous.
  • The book is hard to put down because of this kind of felicitous prose, but it is a long book and takes a long time to read. The Daily News - News
  • Such infelicitous phrasing is, as we've often seen, indicative of an eddy or whorl under the surface of the poem. The Times Literary Supplement
  • For him language is musical, felicitous, comical, flippant, suggestive, buoyant weaponry and adumbrative of mysteries beyond us.
  • the infelicitous typesetting was due to illegible copy
  • Finally, there remains the option of teaching taste - of training the bureaucracy in a felicitous mode of embodied expression and educating the polity to appreciate and respond to it.
  • Your driving fast parallel is spectacularly infelicitous, unless you are suggesting that 'mania junior is the most likely to be damaged by a form of' asocial 'behaviour, be it going to a school where teachers wear gowns, playing chicken on the M1 or driving too fast. Ironic Ducks
  • And Reeve nails the problem with market-led concepts of desert only to adumbrate an alternative that is equally infelicitous.
  • It was, in the felicitous words of Oxford University's orator, that in his years at the Navy Office he had ‘encompassed Britain with wooden walls’.
  • Or, to use the felicitous phrase of the late Northrop Frye, everything in the Scriptures is self-referential.
  • While there are glimpses of felicitous dialogue, there is no chemistry between these two characters to distract from the play's weak dramatic structure.
  • a felicitous life
  • Somewhat infelicitous and arrhythmic on paper, the pledge is powerful when chanted out loud by thousands.
  • infelicitous circumstances
  • The use of the word 'predominately' was not occasional nor infelicitous. Times, Sunday Times
  • Instead, he rendered felicitas as "felicitee" which was already available, and he coined a felicitous new word for beatitudo: "wellfulness. Philip Reynolds: The Biblical Definitions Of The Pursuit Of Happiness
  • Nevertheless, the party's support is up, and there are elections on the way, which is a not infelicitous situation for any political leader to be in.
  • Perhaps because Thérèse stands, to borrow Oscar Wilde's felicitous phrase (which he applied to himself), in symbolic relation to the culture of her age.
  • Second, the felicity, if I may infelicitously use the word, of death is zero.
  • In the end, few if any Egyptians were convinced of the chief French proclamation which announced, in infelicitous Arabic style, that they had come to liberate them by the sword.
  • Additionally, they didn't view their admittedly infelicitous subject matter as somehow requiring a huskier or aggressive musical stance.
  • The style is engaging, but the choice of words is sometimes infelicitous. Times, Sunday Times
  • This line of reasoning is intended to provide a means for felicitous plural and singular pronominal reference under appropriate circumstances.
  • Overnight, it seems, my felicitous situation ended just as quickly.
  • Has there ever been an economist with a more felicitous turn of phrase?
  • Planning and organizing and felicitous visits and sleeping arrangements to be organized and planned. MUSIC FOR BOYS
  • a not felicitously chosen word
  • It seems to me that all "mundane" economists to use Peter Klein's felicitous term interested in how the real economy works ask and try to answer the very same questions, but depending on their doctrinal orientation, their answers are different. On Beating Dead Horses - The Austrian Economists
  • But if literary language is performative and if a performative utterance is not true or false but felicitous or infelicitous, what does it mean for a literary utterance to be felicitous or infelicitous?
  • The words “excellent in the quality he professes,” refer most likely to the Poet's acting; while the term facetious is used, apparently, not in the sense it now bears, but in that of felicitous or happy, as was common at that time. Shakespeare His Life Art And Characters
  • Few are entirely immune, and all that it takes for repossession to take hold is an infelicitous set of circumstances. Times, Sunday Times
  • “Do some decent degree of good and kindness in thy daily life, for the result is a slight pleasurable sense that will seem to warm and delectate thee with felicitous self-laudings; and all that brings thy thoughts to thyself tends to invigorate that central principle by the growth of which thou art to give thyself indefinite life. Septimius Felton, or, The elixir of life
  • The film is in black and white, and it's rather grainy, but intentionally so, though possibly from a felicitous combination of low budget and artistic intent.
  • infelicitous phrasing
  • I had to look up the word "felicitous", I'll add it to my flashcard program if I remember it! Interview with Malin Sandström
  • I can sort of see my way through, but I have trouble explaining why the following is infelicitous.
  • In the first lecture of my freshman economics course at Princeton entitled "The Art of Siffing Among Seasoned Adults," I demonstrate how seasoned adults routinely structure information felicitously (i.e., "sif") to further their own agenda, and I point out that economists can be among the most skillful practitioners of this art. NYT > Home Page
  • Instead of the attack I supposed it to be, from my foolish friend's account, the notice is outrageously eulogistical, a stupidly extravagant laudation from first to last -- and in _three other_ articles, as my sister finds by diligent fishing, they introduce my name with the same felicitous praise (except one instance, though, in a good article by Chorley I am certain); and The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846
  • The expectations raised by the prefatory dedications to this book are fully realised in both its felicitous prose and subtle readings.
  • John was now preparing for his visit to Ireland, and his singularly unfelicitous attempt at royalty. An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800
  • But when the point of an interview is to convey information and ideas clearly, the motive to catch a subject saying something infelicitous appears bizarre. Sam Harris: The Perils of the Print Interview
  • Perhaps no work in the genre infelicitously labeled science fiction has had so much influence or staying power. Jonathan D. Moreno: Brave New World Turns 80
  • But his felicitous use of idiom gives no clue of this.
  • This gives the writer some of his most felicitous moments as he considers a series of eccentric individualists who gave their lives to the weather.
  • His play has been an infelicitous concoction of ingenuity and inaccuracy, the latter being generally fatal at this elite level. Times, Sunday Times
  • Most infelicitously, Jordan Lage, who can be a problem even in one part, is made to play seven.
  • an infelicitous remark
  • It is customary to distinguish the internal from the external work of art: the terminology seems here to be infelicitous, for the work of art (the aesthetic work) is always _internal_; and that which is called _external_ is no longer a work of art. Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic
  • There follows a chapter on the three fugal finales from op.20, its start a high point of felicitous writing.
  • The style is engaging, but the choice of words is sometimes infelicitous. Times, Sunday Times
  •  A performative that "works" is called felicitous and one that does not is called infelicitous. Recently Uploaded Slideshows
  • However, grimly amusing as this spectacle is, the political reality behind these appointments may be less felicitous.
  • In all candor I must say that she approached closely to a realization of the ideals of a book -- a sixteenmo, if you please, fair to look upon, of clear, clean type, well ordered and well edited, amply margined, neatly bound; a human book whose text, as represented by her disposition and her mind, corresponded felicitously with the comeliness of her exterior. The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac
  • My own views, however infelicitously expressed, are more definitive and negative than yours.
  • - to three epigrams, and a fingle oration* It is, however, the very oration that I was moft felicitous to obtain j for, aks! with grief I confefs, that although feven orators ha - rangued upon the queftion, one alone had generofity enough tq argue on the fide of the neglefted fifterhood; with what powers of rhetoric, my reader will very foon have K3 the A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Essay on Old Maids
  • We may be spared, hereafter, the infliction of numberless "felicitous" conjectures, on which the following is scarcely a parody. Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17, No. 099, March, 1876
  • Such infelicitous phrasing is, as we've often seen, indicative of an eddy or whorl under the surface of the poem. The Times Literary Supplement

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