NOUN
- an uncomfortable shirt made of coarse animal hair; worn next to the skin as a penance
How To Use hair shirt In A Sentence
- No one is asking you to put on a hair shirt and give up all your luxuries.
- But wearing a hair shirt was not considered masochistic in the 16th century, nor was personal piety at odds with public prestige. Times, Sunday Times
- Profumo is Italian for scent, which gives the fallen political star a whiff of Ben Jonson: he caught the heady intoxication of cheap perfume one summer’s night, and, though he swapped his evening dress for a hair shirt, he understood the smell could never be washed out. Making the Best of a Sticky Wicket
- If this is a self-improvement holiday, it is hardly the stuff of hair shirts and learning by rote. Times, Sunday Times
- What I found in Yule, Hobson-Jobson, p 861 excuse loss of diacriticals: "Sackcloth", often used in the masochistic sense of "hair shirt", apparently traces back to the Persian "Sakkalat, saklatun", which meant a kind of woollen broadcloth. Languagehat.com: MORE PYNCHONIAN VOCAB.
- No one is asking you to put on a hair shirt and give up all your luxuries.
- Under any circumstance, an official retraction is a terrible hair shirt.
- You can either make things worse by continuing with guilt and self-loathing, or you can take off that hair shirt and bring the relationship back into focus. Times, Sunday Times
- I don't go around whipping myself and wearing horsehair shirts.
