(1) They make you stand with a mangy dog and force you to be mawkish: "This is Fido - he needs a new home.
(2) She is single-minded, but she ramps it up, as if to sabotage journalistic attempts to frame her life in mawkish, triumph-over-adversity terms.
(3) "Without getting too mawkish about it I come from a family which, like lots of families, has been very heavily affected and disfigured by the revolutions and the wars of the last sort of century.
(4) It is difficult to observe, without the option of yelling and swearing, how disingenuous this is, how slimy and mawkish for a government happy to live with the idea of people living in squalor, in fuel poverty, going hungry, suddenly to find itself unable to bear the idea of a child in a smoky car.
(5) When I was young, vegetarianism was still a cult activity practised by filthy, bendy-boned hippies or mawkishly sentimental teenage girls who would probably be keen to renege on the whole non-meat-eating deal if only they had the strength to lift a whole steak into a pan.
(6) Now, for all that we mawkishly spray the bicycles of dead cyclists white and chain them to lamp posts, for all that we heap cellophane-wrapped flowers in remembrance of murder victims and lost celebrities alike, we have never been worse at mourning.
(7) It doesn't do to get mawkish – it's not the end of the world, certainly not for Ross, who is generally thought to feed on adversity and get a bit lazy in good times.
(8) Jacqueline Wilson's brand of naive narrative prevents her books from being mawkish or sentimental.
(9) The endless mawkish comparisons, wailing headlines and maudlin snippets.
(10) If that makes it sound mawkish or grim, it really isn't: there is sadness and there are regrets, but most of all there is plenty of laughter, lots of fun, tenderness, honesty and plain speaking.
(11) He was very sensitive to the danger that unless they were careful the film could become very mawkish and sentimental, "and there were a lot of nuns present all the time, which always makes you feel a little bit irreverent.
(12) He showed too that he has a nice line in self-deprecation and is capable of altering his register from light to shade, even if the lower-decibel passages sometimes veered toward the mawkish and had one or two unkind voices in the press corps recalling the notorious "quiet man" performance of Iain Duncan Smith.
(13) He is indeed a wonderfully entertaining poet, and his fine judgment in such matters persists in the unprecedentedly personal final poems, "Maren" and "Iona", their tone, as he rightly thought, "not mawkish .
(14) They're corny, mawkish – but they're shameless enough to get you to press the button.
(15) In the light of this merrily unceasing gravy train, it's perhaps a bit rich that anyone, anywhere, is only now criticising Hologram Tupac for making money off a dead man; the past 16 years have been an object lesson in music industry exploitation, and surely it's impossible to sink lower than that mawkish Elton John duet anyway?
(16) People say John Lewis has been canny by making an annual mawkish short film instead of having someone shouting: “It’s deals deals deals at John Lewis this Christmas!”, but this is really taking it up a level.
(17) Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn ceremonial funeral, are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate.
(18) True, none of the identikit ballads that have hogged the Christmas No 1 slot since the demise of the Spice Girls are giving Unchained Melody's publishers a squeaky bum – it's unlikely, for instance, that Shayne Ward's That's My Goal will ever be "our song" for any couple – but, Beatles and Spice Girls aside, these ballads are merely continuing a late December tradition of mawkishness and base sentimentality.
(19) Facebook Twitter Pinterest It’s an intriguing take, suggesting an ET-like robot movie with a Spielbergian sense of optimism about the unknown that will hopefully avoid the mawkish sentimentality of the US film-maker’s own AI.
(20) After nearly five decades, I have never been able to tell you that I love you, for fear you will see this as trite and mawkish.
Schmaltzy
Definition:
Example Sentences:
(1) Behind the dancing girls and schmaltzy lyrics that usually characterise pop songs, these men act as the all-oppressing eye of the industry: telling female singers that weight loss and sexual objectification are the only feasible routes to stardom; stripping down women in music videos to their underwear while leaving their male counterparts untouched.
(2) Nine years after Jonathan Franzen derided Oprah Winfrey's choice of "schmaltzy, one-dimensional" novels for her book club, becoming the first author to be formally disinvited to appear on her show, these two giants of American cultural life appear to have buried the hatchet.
(3) And that schmaltzy Bronner's experience wouldn't be complete without lashings of cheesy slogans.
(4) But just in case you think we've gone all Christmassy, sugary and schmaltzy, check out some fun in a sports shop once the customers have left and former Manchester United midfielder Paul Scholes, showing that he has still got what it takes, scoring a goal from his own half.
(5) And while it's true that gridiron jocks can't seem to perform unless interrupted every 10 seconds by schmaltzy corporations peddling their wares, brass bands booming across the pitch and cheerleaders wiggling and jiggling like wind-up titillators, it's also true that American spectators do at least get what they're promised - it may take five hours but eventually they will see 60 minutes of football.
(6) As the high emotion of his protracted and schmaltzy press conference today exposed once again – complete with a refusal to admit to having made the wrong call, and the bizarre insistence that the war had made the world safer – it is always important to him not only to be serving the national interest, but a greater good too.
(7) It is, of course, notable that David Cameron, in his schmaltzy, feelgood speech to his party yesterday, made little particular reference to the row over child benefit.
(8) Franzen does not shy away from other topics that have proved controversial for him in the past, including his rift with Oprah Winfrey in 2001, which saw the chat show host uninvite the award-winning author from her book club after he said the “schmaltzy, one-dimensional” novels she championed made him cringe.
(9) Franzen followed these comments with an appearance on National Public Radio where he talked about the "split" between the "high-art literary tradition" and "entertaining books" and an interview at an Oregon bookstore where he said that Winfrey had "picked enough schmaltzy, one-dimensional … [books] … that I cringe, myself, even though I think she's really smart and she's really fighting the good fight".
(10) Like Titanic and its schmaltzy My Heart Will Go On, Sea of Blood produced a hit song: My Heart Will Remain Faithful.
(11) With its orange camo-print uniforms, scarlet berets, sentimental gatherings and schmaltzy music, it looks like a fascist militia as imagined by JG Ballard.
(12) Lotan and McBride talked about Facebook’s recent “Look Back” videos, constructed by an algorithm to show individual Facebook users their key moments from their time on the social network, to be shared with friends as a schmaltzy video.
(13) There was even a schmaltzy movie – You've Got Mail – based around its email service.
(14) It was precisely because Juno's screenwriter, former stripper Diablo Cody, had given Juno such sassy dialogue (think Buffy, think My So-Called Life, think Dawson's Creek before it got schmaltzy) that Page took the part.
(15) Unease about being categorised as a popular novelist – "schmaltzy and one-dimensional" – was what led to his being disinvited by Oprah Winfrey's book club in 2001; since he was "uncomfortable and conflicted", she said ("a pompous prick", as someone else put it), it would be wrong to have him on the show.
(16) Kenneth Clarke (4) The justice secretary was one of the few who had seen the cabinet room before last May, and in that first assembly he provided a note of discord that could have been scripted to avoid things getting too schmaltzy, by being told off for "engaging in another conversation".