Vain, talkative person

Usage examples of popinjay.

And this magnificent, absurd creature--this mouthing, grimacing, attitudinising popinjay, thought Austin, was no other than Mr Bucephalus Buskin, with whom he had chatted on easy terms in a common field only a few days previously!

His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed.

To certain Lombards ready in their hond The sum of gold, and got of them his bond, And home he went, merry as a popinjay.

Gilded popinjays who pretend to scholarship and whose only virtue is that they provided employment for impoverished sizars was the consensus reached last Michaelmas, was it not?

He is, in brief, a hollow and incompetent creature, a strutter and poseur, a popinjay, a pretty one.

As in the inventories of the thirty towns I find no mention either of stockings or of shoes for Indians, with the exception of the low shoes and buckles worn by the Alferez Real, it seems the gorgeous costumes ended at the knee, and that these popinjays rode barefoot, with, perhaps, large iron Gaucho spurs fastened by strips of mare-hide round their ankles, and hanging down below their naked feet.

With his painted shield, embroidered surcote, and golden spurs, he felt himself a gaudy popinjay in the company of ravens.

The men of the world who flocked to pay their court to her, and the popinjays who followed them, all knew this look and a tone in her rich voice which could cut like a knife when she chose that it should do so.

I might here name a sort of hues devised for the nonce, wherewith to please fantastical heads, as goose-turd green, peas-porridge tawny, popinjay blue, lusty gallant, the devil-in-the-head (I should say the hedge), and such like.

Then there were stuffed birds, popinjays, and maggot-pies and kingfishers, and peacocks with all their feathers but two, and tiny birds like beetles, and a reputed phoenix which smelt of incense and cinnamon.

Roanna had learned much of court fashion when she’d spent an entire morning spying on the popinjays who sought audience with Queen Regent Marie de Guise.

But then Elizabeth often drifted off into Welsh, German, or Italian as well just to keep the flock of popinjays around her off-balance.

Were you to metamorphose into one of those strutting, supercilious popinjays mat seem to abound in the capital, and sometimes deign to come out to Goohm.

Were you to metamorphose into one of those strutting, supercilious popinjays that seem to abound in the capital, and sometimes deign to come out to Goohm, I might be some loath to admit I know you.