A deliberate pretense or exaggerated display

Usage examples of affectation.

For a long moment Cavilon glared with distaste at the powdered face gazing back at him, then resumed all the affectations that achieved the startling alteration in his looks.

After the reception I had met with I could without affectation pose as offended, and visit the family no more, for whether I were guilty or innocent, Madame X.

When Myron went into the bank to cash a cheque, the third day of his visit, Dingle insisted on his coming into the private office, struggled a little with remarks about the weather, and abruptly invited him to dinner--his the only house in Black Thread that had the affectation of evening dinner.

It was thus a very disgusted Princess who made her early exit from the palace between a double line of bowing flunkeys, masking her anger behind an affectation of ultra-Royal dignity.

And she ate with a candid gusto that pleased Cleggett, who loathed in a woman a finical affectation of indifference to food.

Americanism first recorded in 1840 and attacked as a needless lexical affectation within the year.

CHAPTER XXIV THE DUEL Cleggett took Wilton Barnstable by the sleeve and drew him towards Loge, who, still seated on the deck with his long legs stretched out in front of him, was now yawning with a cynical affectation of boredom.

Melanie raised the lorgnette to her eyes and looked about the room with it, an affectation that always amused both Christine and Eleanor, who dipped her head behind her book now to hide her smile.

She carried a long-handled lorgnette in her right hand, an affectation she had indulged in for as far back as Aidan could remember, though he suspected that, as with Wulf and his quizzing glass, she had perfect eyesight.

A foil for his virtues is provided by the character of Byron, whose nauseous affectations, animal coarseness, niggardliness, except where his own personal comfort was involved, and deep-seated snobbishness, makes Shelley into an angel of light.

Palaver said as he led Morg and Whort down a low, dark, odiferous tunnel, is to face the fear that produced the affectation, while at the same time indigesting a special formulaof which I am the inventor and which should evacuate the speak glands.

Perspicuity requires a style at once clear and comprehensive and entirely free from pomp and pedantry and affectation or any straining after effect.

In like manner, we shall represent human nature at first to the keen appetite of our reader, in that more plain and simple manner in which it is found in the country, and shall hereafter hash and ragoo it with all the high French and Italian seasoning of affectation and vice which courts and cities afford.

During her earlier life, when she had been known as Egyptian Mary, she had witnessed sufficient of the behaviour of the male members of the first raters not to wish to adopt their affectations and manners, and she did not expect people of the tradesmen class would be any better.

She herself thought it was an absurd affectation, sure to indicate to one and all that the tea sipper was far more interested in creating an illusion of breeding rather than actually being well-bred.