Lack of appropriate seriousness

Usage examples of levity.

Dierick, who has attached himself to Jacques as a sort of amanuensis with pretensions to Boswellian status, pursed his lips in disapproval of such out-of-place levity.

Koreish would have restored the idols of the Caaba, if their levity had not been checked by a seasonable reproof.

Among these there is one which in all its characteristics is polarically opposite to the Euclidean system, and which is destined for this reason to become the space-system of levity.

I believe Honour could never have prevailed on her to leave Upton without her seeing Jones, had it not been for those two strong instances of a levity in his behaviour, so void of respect, and indeed so highly inconsistent with any degree of love and tenderness in great and delicate minds.

The grave simplicity of the philosopher was ill calculated to engage her wanton levity, or to fix that unbounded passion for variety, which often discovered personal merit in the meanest of mankind.

Exasperated by this apparent neglect, the Sarmatians soon forgot, with the levity of barbarians, the services which they had so lately received, and the dangers which still threatened their safety.

This fact, seen together with the characteristics of radioactivity, tells us that in such elements gravity has so far got the upper hand of levity that the physical substance is unable to persist as a spatially extended, coherent unit.

Barnard, Dean of Derry, now Bishop of Killaloe, drew up an address to Dr. Johnson on the occasion, replete with wit and humour, but which it was feared the Doctor might think treated the subject with too much levity.

Our next task will be to develop a clearer conception of these four modes of action of levity.

Those Barbarians despised in then turn the restless and subtile levity of the Orientals, the authors of every heresy.

The levity of the words were belied by the cool watchful expression on his face as his eyes constantly travelled the room.

In fact, some days afterwards she created him Duke of Orkney, and on the 15th of the same month--that is to say, scarcely four months after the death of Darnley--with levity that resembled madness, Mary, who had petitioned for a dispensation to wed a Catholic prince, her cousin in the third degree, married Bothwell, a Protestant upstart, who, his divorce notwithstanding, was still bigamous, and who thus found himself in the position of having four wives living, including the queen.

Both fields are characterized by an interaction between gravity and levity, this interaction being of opposite nature in each of them.

Burnet apologized for the levity with which he had conducted some of his arguments, by the excuse that he wrote in a learned language for scholars alone, not for the vulgar.

But he that deliberates, is so farre forth free, nor can be said to have already given: But if he promise often, and yet give seldome, he ought to be condemn'd of levity, and be called not a Donour, but Doson.