How To Use Gentility In A Sentence

  • It was also a thoroughfare for the gay equipages of the square, which passed through it daily on their way to and from the adjoining stables, thereby endangering the lives of precocious babies who could crawl, but could not walk away from home, as well as affording food for criticism and scandal, not to mention the leaving behind of a species of secondhand odour of gentility such as coachmen and footmen can give forth. Fighting the Flames
  • With suit pressed and vacuous smile, he remains the image of gentility: he is privileged, sheltered and supported from the realities of engaging with the world.
  • With independence approaching, the small community was gripped by a wave of hedonistic debauchery that undermined its pretence at prim parasol-and-petticoat gentility.
  • The next specimen is perhaps a 'swell' out at elbows, a seedy and somewhat ragged remnant of a very questionable kind of gentility -- a gentility engendered in 'coal-holes' and 'cider-cellars,' in 'shades,' and such-like midnight 'kens' -- suckled with brandy and water and port-wine negus, and fed with deviled kidneys and toasted cheese. Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852
  • How reassuring it is, to know that our governing party staffs its conferences with persons of such gentility, good sense, and tact.
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  • But as Regency exuberance yielded to Victorian gentility, his style did not move with public taste, and he began to outlive his popularity.
  • She couldn't bear to think of the woman laughing behind his back, exploiting his gentility, his naïveté. THE HELLBOUND HEART
  • He was one evening at the house of his friend Burke, when he was beset by a tenth muse, an Irish widow and authoress, just arrived from Ireland, full of brogue and blunders, and poetic fire and rantipole gentility. The Life of Oliver Goldsmith
  • Since ‘any ill-bred person threatened to undermine everyone else's claims to gentility, such rudeness had to be banned from polite social intercourse’.
  • Once he became rich, he bought a huge house and created this appearance of gentility and breeding in his daughters.
  • Architecture became a reflection of gentility and a tool for social rivalry. Times, Sunday Times
  • She thinks expensive clothes are a mark of gentility.
  • It creates a sort of scholarly "rapport" -- this use of commas -- between the gentility of the author and the assumed gentility of the reader, taking the latter into a kind of amiable partnership in ironic superiority. Suspended Judgments Essays on Books and Sensations
  • As the show's perennially tuxedoed butler, "Mr. Aly," as he was universally known, represented an elegant conduit to a vanished old Washington, a place of exclusive salons, bipartisan cordials and relative gentility. The man who would greet 'The Press'
  • How he'd made her feel, in the first months of their knowing one another, his sweetness, his gentility. GALILEE
  • Many, such as Fielding's cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, would go on laughing at Richardson, the anxious arriviste, for his ‘low’ pretensions to gentility.
  • Shabbily forlorn were that man's habiliments -- turned and re-turned, patched, darned, weather - stained, grease-stained -- but still retaining that kind of mouldy, grandiose, bastard gentility, which implies that the wearer has known better days; and, in the downward progress of fortunes when they once fall, may probably know still worse. What Will He Do with It? — Volume 10
  • Meanwhile, music for the home centred on the piano, which was now the quintessential domestic instrument, badge of female gentility and social respectability.
  • And Thomas Hudson, born as poor as herself and just as upward mobile, was gentility personified, sensibility made flesh.
  • _Gentility_ is mean, and _gentilesse_ [378] is obsolete. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • There were several serious and retiring couples, of whom one or other was an invalid, and several who were poor, and preferred the plated gentility of Mrs. Harmon's hotel -- it was called the St. Albans; Mrs. Harmon liked the name -- to the genuine poverty of such housekeeping as they could have set up. The Minister's Charge
  • The rattrap vendor does not perform his gentility well enough to pass himself off for more than he is.
  • Those of high social standing and sufficient leisure could cultivate their person ‘as a work of art’ in which expression and gesture became indexes of gentility and civilite.
  • Doing so, she challenges conceptions of gender, race, gentility, and commodity culture that were already in flux after the war.
  • While literacy is associated with inherent gentility in a colonial space where social standards are in flux, literacy does not have the same currency for the governess back home in Britain.
  • Chintz armchairs and couch, and a walnut sideboard with light-catching decanters and a crystal fruit bowl on lace, completed to the air of polite gentility.
  • Of all vanities and fopperies, to brag of gentility is the greatest; for what is it they crack so much of, and challenge such superiority, as if they were demigods? Anatomy of Melancholy
  • She thinks expensive clothes are a mark of gentility.
  • Association with the Tuesday Club offered an opportunity to acquire some of that old world patina of gentility and refinement so desired by the Chesapeake elite.
  • Gentility and respectability are the last things people of any class wish to symbolise now.
  • He himself had slender claims to gentility. Times, Sunday Times
  • Gentility is not the hallmark of Snyder's books: They're violent, unsparing and tough on both the reader and the characters.
  • I have been in many a richer home where there was not a hundredth part of the true gentility -- the gentility of unapologizing simplicity and kindness. The Friendly Road: New Adventures in Contentment
  • Since drinking coffee socially was something that gentility and the aristocracy did, the middle classes could prove their own respectability and gentility by doing the same.
  • Individuals can learn to act politely, but they cannot become genteel unless their gentility is publicly acknowledged by persons who are themselves genteel.
  • Pink roses: elegance, gracefulness, refinement, gentility, style and poetic romance but being combined with fun and lightheartedness.
  • However, I would suggest you have some misconceived conceptions about the gentility of World War II, or certainly its portrayal to the public.
  • Any literate person could read the etiquette books and learn the rules of gentility. America Past and Present
  • Neither did they establish their claims to gentility at the expense of their tailors, for as yet those offenders against the pockets of society and the tranquility of all aspiring young gentlemen were unknown in New Amsterdam; every good housewife made the clothes of her husband and family, and even the goede vrouw of Van Twiller himself thought it no disparagement to cut out her husband's linsey-woolsey galligaskins. Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8
  • Claiming that Sarah Ferguson comes from Basingstoke is pushing it: she grew up on the 876-acre family farm at Dummer, safely south of the M3, gentility's bulwark against the town which sprawls along the motorway's north side.
  • Eventually, though, her Catholic aspirations to Protestant gentility and heavy-handed elocution lessons failed to soothe her brute of a husband.
  • Compared to the somnolent and soporific gentility of late nineteenth-century verse, the poetry produced by American writers in the twentieth-century displays a remarkable dynamism.
  • The diversity of his choices reflects the desire of his patrons to surround themselves with the trappings of culture and gentility that at the time were equated with European antiques.
  • The code of gentility was far more pervasive and important than the influence of the group of self-styled gentry.
  • The Earl had suggested that David pretend to be an orphan whose parents had been American gentility.
  • These dealers were usually people of independent means, and a certain reticent gentility hovered over their dealings.
  • Pink roses symbolize grace and gentility in modern rose vocabulary.
  • Head into the wooded foothills to Badenweiler, a spa town with that mix of classical gentility, raffishness and effusive horticulture that marks the better thermal spots.
  • Generally speaking, though, suburban gentility has seeped across the map.
  • How often is this the prelude to a review of barbed gentility? Times, Sunday Times
  • The exclusive force is represented by caste and class, by gentility and donnishness, by sectarianism and nationalism, and even by patriotism ” and the inclusive force is represented by Walt Whitmanism and Christianity.” Father Payne
  • she conveys an aura of elegance and gentility
  • Tchaikovsky was the model of gentility—his voice was gentle, his manners of the most perfect politeness.
  • There were several serious and retiring couples, of whom one or other was an invalid, and several who were poor, and preferred the plated gentility of Mrs. Harmon's hotel -- it was called the St. Albans; Mrs. Harmon liked the name -- to the genuine poverty of such housekeeping as they could have set up. The Minister's Charge
  • It's the Tokyo Dome, in the capital of a country known for its public facade of reserve and gentility.
  • Rick Linklater's digitally shot, computer-animated movie is a work of homey gentility and apparently easy eloquence.
  • The square looks in on itself, exuding an air of imperturbable gentility.
  • Happily, too, she has not been reared in the stereotyped boarding-school shallowness of knowledge and vulgarities of gentility; but educated, like myself, by the free influences of Nature, longing for no halls and palaces save those that we build as we list, in fairyland; educated to comprehend and share the fancies which are more than booklore to the worshipper of art and song. Kenelm Chillingly — Complete
  • But the square looks in on itself, exuding an air of imperturbable gentility.
  • Respect for gentility, Cooperation for efficiency, Innovation for progress, Common benefit for future.
  • He liked to prick the bubble of their gentility by doing things like that.
  • Eschewing the ostentatious gentility of readers, who enjoy parading their superficial knowledge, she pursues her intellectual work without need of an audience.
  • Increasingly a biological definition of gentility was being challenged and surpassed by a cultural one, which allowed an expanding middling order access, through an appropriate use of their wealth, to social kudos.
  • Clerks were continually chided for carrying themselves with a pretence of gentility in their dress, but clerks had little choice in the matter.
  • Gentleman, a circumstance of which an ignorant panegyrist has praised him for not being proud; when the truth is, that the appellation of Gentleman, though now lost in the indiscriminate assumption of Esquire, was commonly taken by those who could not boast of gentility. The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D.
  • It made Lydia wonder whether gentility might be a product of genetic engineering.
  • Once he became rich, he bought a huge house and created this appearance of gentility and breeding in his daughters.
  • They make him express a vulgar scorn at Polonius which utterly degrades his gentility, and which no explanation can render palatable; they make him show contempt, and curl up the nose at Ophelia’s father, —contempt in its very grossest and most hateful form; but they get applause by it: it is natural, people say; that is, the words are scornful, and the actor expresses scorn, and that they can judge of: but why so much scorn, and of that sort, they never think of asking. On the Tragedies of Shakspere Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation
  • Since any ill-bred person threatened to undermine everyone else's claims to gentility, such rudeness had to be banned from polite social intercourse.

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