What is "conventionality"

Usage examples of "conventionality".

The impulse, it was quite obvious, was prompted less by conventionality than by a knightliness of heart, and Celestina, who had never before been the recipient of such courtesies, found herself inexpressibly touched by the trifling attentions.

If to throw off the shackles of Old World pedantry, and defy the paltry rules and examples of grammarians and rhetoricians, is the special province and the chartered privilege of the American writer, Timothy Dexter is the founder of a new school, which tramples under foot the conventionalities that hampered and subjugated the faculties of the poets, the dramatists, the historians, essayists, story-tellers, orators, of the worn-out races which have preceded the great American people.

So the thoughtful doctor made up his mind to have a good talk with Euthymia, and put her on her guard, if Lurida showed any tendency to forget the conventionalities in her eager pursuit of knowledge.

Her enterprise, her daring, her freedom from conventionality, have been the theme of the novelists and the horror of the dowagers having marriageable daughters.

And drink is peculiarly fitted to bring out this perverse quality--drink that blurs all the conventionalities, even those built up into moral ideas by centuries and ages of unbroken custom.

For she instantly realized that, like all those who give up war upon society and come in and surrender, he was enormously agitated about his new status, was impressed by the conventionalities to a degree that made him almost weak and mildly absurd.

Their aberrations, it is true, were not of a very formidable character, and need not have been guarded but for the severe conventionalities of both sects.

Beneath the conventionalities of his class the girl felt the man a powerful character, with all the latent strength of his nation-building ancestors.

It is a comfort to women to be able to give their affection freely where conventionalities and circumstances make the return of it in degree unlikely.

I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh.

She will find a way to modify the traditional conventionalities so as not to fetter her own free spirit.

There were classic affectations in England, there were masks and mummeries and classic puerilities at court and in noble houses--Elizabeth's court would well have liked to be classical, remarks Guizot--but Shakespeare was not fettered by classic conventionalities, nor did he obey the unities, nor attempt to separate on the stage the tragedy and comedy of life-- "immense and living stage," says the writer I like to quote because he is French, upon which all things are represented, as it were, in their solid form, and in the place which they occupied in a stormy and complicated civilization.

I would also include pleasures of many kinds which seem harmless and good at the time, and are pursued because many accept them—I mean conventionalities, sociabilities, and fashions in their various development, these being mostly approved by the masses, although they may be unreal, and even unhealthy superfluities.