(a.) Possessing or exhibiting the qualities popularly regarded as belonging to high birth and breeding; free from vulgarity, or lowness of taste or behavior; adapted to a refined or cultivated taste; polite; well-bred; as, genteel company, manners, address.
(a.) Graceful in mien or form; elegant in appearance, dress, or manner; as, the lady has a genteel person. Law.
(a.) Suited to the position of lady or a gentleman; as, to live in a genteel allowance.
Example Sentences:
(1) Cleeve Hill was once the site of a 'bawdy' racecourse, before it was moved down the hill into genteel Cheltenham.
(2) While the opening tranche of "tales" derive from the work of forgotten contemporary humorists, the pieces of London reportage that he began to contribute to the Morning Chronicle in autumn 1834 ("Gin Shops", "Shabby-Genteel People", "The Pawnbroker's Shop") are like nothing else in pre-Victorian journalism: bantering and hard-headed by turns, hectic and profuse, falling over themselves to convey every last detail of the metropolitan front-line from which Dickens sent back his dispatches.
(3) An hour north of Paris in genteel Chantilly, England have prepared in unusually low-key fashion two years after a humiliating World Cup in which they were sent packing after two matches.
(4) Gustave's beatific smile and genteel demeanour work harmoniously with the purple hotel uniforms (Anderson does love a man in uniform).
(5) How popular would "Boris Island" – the mayor's fantasy airport in the Thames estuary – be in Clacton and genteel Frinton?
(6) From the late 1950s to the 1970s, the new, subsidised British drama was making waves at the Royal Court Theatre and in the regions - and finding critical support from commentators weary of the genteel West End theatre.
(7) Last week, the UK Statistics Authority gave him a reprimand that broke from the genteel language of the civil service.
(8) They signed Bush expressly as the first major British female exponent of this genteel genre.
(9) It is another to be given a genteel kicking by David Hare (who wrote in this newspaper last week that the Labour leader was worse than Neil Kinnock).
(10) Today Paris is still the different cities encapsulated by Hugo and Manet; Manet's chic Left Bank haunts are as fashionable and relatively genteel as 150 years ago.
(11) The wild, unstable undercliff on the Dorset-Devon border provided John Fowles with the perfect landscape to contrast with the genteel world of Lyme Regis in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (“In summer it is the nearest this country can offer to a tropical jungle”).
(12) This being a story about powerful, litigious people, it was composed in befittingly genteel terms; the pair are described as having a "friendship".
(13) It's a sleepy little town, beloved by genteel visitors who come for its microclimate – said to be 3C warmer than the rest of France – and exotic gardens.
(14) Norbert Smith: A Life was a brilliant satirical one-off on the history of British cinema through the eyes of a genteel luvvie who had seen it all, from 30s Will Hay comedies through to swinging 60s thrillers.
(15) There, his mother, in her mid-30s, dressed in a spotless white blouse, and with a Lady Diana-like haircut, was reading a newspaper and sipping from a genteel white teacup.
(16) She was born Muriel Camberg to a Jewish engineer father and an English, music-teacher mother, in the genteel Edinburgh inner suburb of Bruntsfield.
(17) But in the summer of 1983 this genteel corner, bypassed by shoppers and tourists, found itself a focus of national interest.
(18) An acrimonious divorce, scandal over a young model and nude photos at pool parties – Silvio Berlusconi's family traumas might not seem the ideal backdrop for the genteel spouses' programme at a G8 summit.
(19) And the genteel visitors who first inspected it had no means of knowing that even as expert an anatomist as Stubbs had got some details wrong.
(20) In the genteel, cultivated and fashionable crowd, Manet painted himself and his friends: the poets Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, and composer Jacques Offenbach.
Prudish
Definition:
(a.) Like a prude; very formal, precise, or reserved; affectedly severe in virtue; as, a prudish woman; prudish manners.
Example Sentences:
(1) Much of his work – including National Lampoon's Animal House (1978), Meatballs (1979) and Ghostbusters (1984), all of which he co-wrote, and Caddyshack (1980), which he co-wrote and directed – changed the course of US film comedy, even if the prudish might argue that it was not for the better.
(2) This can be surprising to the relatively prudish mainstream of previous generations.
(3) Read says that while his father operated in louche artistic circles and had "ditched his first wife to be with my mother, slightly in the liberated spirit of Shelley or Gauguin", he had been born and brought up in the 19th century and deep down had a "rather prudish" approach to life.
(4) Recent news regarding Ira Sachs’ new film Love Is Strange is a prime example of how age classification systems can smother art under bigoted and prudish anxieties.
(5) Emin's beautiful body is her one great idea, but I suspect that she is rather prudish, which means that there are limits to the use she can make of her body and its rackety past.
(6) I worry because I find myself siding with Don over Megan and given the selfish, prudish, treachorous, patriarchal figure he is I know this ain't right.
(7) Apart from physiological flushes represented by emotional or prudish blushing, post-prandial flushes and menopausal hot flushes, various pathologic flushes exist of various etiologies: endocrine, dysmetabolic, histaminic and iatrogenic.
(8) Liekens has said the UK has been "too prudish for too long" about sex education.
(9) For a humorist who came on the scene in the 1960s, Coren was surprisingly prudish.
(10) In the UK, we are still slightly discomfited by the idea of baring all in a confessional essay, partly, one presumes, because we are restrained by a sort of cultural prudishness, but also because we do not wish to appear self-indulgent.
(11) I had friends who lost their virginity at 13, and I’d be like, ‘Disgusting!’” Despite her prudishness, as soon as Peake started to act, she was stereotyped.
(12) I half shouted to a rep, ‘I’m not singing that’ and he said ‘yeah it is a bit naughty’, as if I was being prudish.
(13) I am asking, if Christianity managed to imbue Anglo-Saxon cultures with this prudishness, why did the moral strictures of any other religious system not imbue their cultures?"
(14) "You don't think Islam has had just as much an effect on prudishness?"
(15) Facebook has been accused of a lot of things, from riding roughshod over people’s privacy to prudishly censoring the most innocuous of photographs.
(16) She will insist she is not arguing for "prudishness or hankering after some rose-tinted picture of childhood", but for families and children that can negotiate issues of sexuality with dignity and respect.
(17) It is hard to imagine a scandal of Claridge’s proportions kicking off over here – not because Americans are less prudish than Brits, but because breastfeeding in public is clearly just a scheduling issue, and if New Yorkers understand anything it’s the Primacy of the Schedule.
(18) 'I'm really not prudish about doing nudity,' she continues.
(19) Galleguillos said his tweets – calling Rentería a “weeping negrito” and attacking “prudish, timid hypocrites” – were sent “in good faith … I called him negrito with affection, caringly, because he cried, the man cried.
(20) Experts warned that Seek McCartney’s approval should not necessarily be hailed as a sign of a relaxation of censors’ usually prudish attitudes.