(n.) The quality or state of being modest; that lowly temper which accompanies a moderate estimate of one's own worth and importance; absence of self-assertion, arrogance, and presumption; humility respecting one's own merit.
(n.) Natural delicacy or shame regarding personal charms and the sexual relation; purity of thought and manners; due regard for propriety in speech or action.
Example Sentences:
(1) "It is not a likeable work," ran one unfavourable review, "containing little humour or tenderness or modesty.
(2) Clearly recovered from her attack of British modesty, she jumps out of an SUV in denim shorts and a crop top, her voice almost completely lost.
(3) Against all the odds, he almost single-handedly rescued hundreds of children, mostly Jewish, from the Nazis – an enduring example of the difference that good people can make even in the darkest of times.” “Because of his modesty, this astonishing contribution only came to light many years later.” Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sir Nicholas Winton meeting some of the (now grown up) children he helped save.
(4) This was a galaxy-spanning utopia whose name was chosen for its self-deprecating modesty, rather than something grandiose like the Federation or the Empire.
(5) Principal component analysis was used to identify five clothing dimensions (experimentation, self-enhancement, conformity, economics and practicality, and modesty), two body satisfaction dimensions (face and extremities, midsection and weight), and two eating dimensions (drive for thinness and binging).
(6) Whatever veiled women say about modesty, tradition or feeling closer to God, we in the £5-aspirant group worry that they are oppressed: that it is about being hidden and silenced.
(7) "The gentleman, opening the circular, hinged portcullis on the front of his helmet, offered his services; and perceiving that her modesty declined what her situation rendered necessary, took her up in his arms without further delay and carried her down the hill."
(8) And when you see Portman naked and leaning in profile on a dresser, she's posed deliberately, artfully, bony elbows protecting her modesty.
(9) Their letter, written in terms of false modesty, almost as if their aim was to protect Mr Brown, not destroy him, lacked any ideological substance.
(10) Interviews were conducted with 85 Puerto-Rican-born women encountered in one urban community in the United States concerning their obstetrical and gynecological preventive health participation, modesty pattern, and feelings of being male dominated.
(11) Mention of it brings on another attack of modesty – "No matter how bad a music video, the song remains intact" – but his videos are weird and intriguing.
(12) New York Times editors don't do modesty, Abramson no exception.
(13) His modesty showed when he declined an invitation to attend the ceremonies marking the 1994 signing of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty.
(14) Those sentiments had been echoed in the seemingly very different context of Qom, the centre of Shia religious studies, where most women move about in full-length black cloaks – the chadors that are the ultimate expression of Shia modesty.
(15) But the modesty isn’t the problem, it’s the listening.
(16) It received 80,000 responses and delivered a landmark 630-page report in 29 days, calling for the law concerning sexual violence to be modernised, removing terms such as “intent to outrage her modesty”.
(17) When I take Viagra, it stands up.” B: “My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body.” On modesty A: “I do not have brilliance, wit or smartness.
(18) In a small side room at the Guardian, with Al Pacino glowering from a poster above us, James Corden is performing a masterclass in modesty.
(19) Prestige was regained by workers, who originally were thought to have lost their honor by violating the cultural patterns of seclusion and modesty.
(20) We conjecture that for highly religious women modernising factors raise the risk and temptation in women’s environments that imperil their reputation for modesty: veiling would then be a strategic response, a form either of commitment to prevent the breach of religious norms or of signalling women’s piety to their communities.
Puritan
Definition:
(n.) One who, in the time of Queen Elizabeth and the first two Stuarts, opposed traditional and formal usages, and advocated simpler forms of faith and worship than those established by law; -- originally, a term of reproach. The Puritans formed the bulk of the early population of New England.
(n.) One who is scrupulous and strict in his religious life; -- often used reproachfully or in contempt; one who has overstrict notions.
(a.) Of or pertaining to the Puritans; resembling, or characteristic of, the Puritans.
Example Sentences:
(1) It may have been like punk never ‘appened, but you caught a whiff of the movement’s scorched earth puritanism in the mocking disdain with which Smash Hits addressed rock-star hedonism.
(2) Central to the whole project was a patient fascination with religion, represented, in particular, in his attempt to understand the revolutionary power of puritanism.
(3) In the more puritanical United States, however, where the same inequalities are evident, I wouldn't hold my breath.
(4) Early in the film, a journalist comes to interview him about his defunct literary career; he berates her for caring (intellectually, Jep is a closet puritan).
(5) This mythology, embodied over those decades in the Horatio Alger stories consumed particularly by upwardly mobile young men and in the phrase "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps", consistently held out that American promise by equating hard work (along with other good Puritan values such as delayed gratification, temperance, saving and self-reliance) with economic success.
(6) Back in the high puritan era of 17th-century England, when Oliver Cromwell tried to ban all forms of public dance, from court masques and ballets to maypole dancing, the effect of the prohibition was to create a generation for whom dance represented sin.
(7) We were telling ourselves he's too puritanical, he's not going to like the movie, and in fact he loved it."
(8) (1966), worked with Simpson, Arnold Wesker and John Arden , and, having staged Howard Barker ’s Cheek in 1970, collaborated with him in 1986 on the audacious Women Beware Women, adapting Middleton’s Jacobean original with poisonous puritanism.
(9) Cultural puritans might denounce the whole idea as a perverse extreme of reality TV, which in its Big Brother incarnation – a format also invented by the Dutch – was always designed primarily as a form of psychological torture for our sadistic viewing pleasure.
(10) Like the American revolution and the French revolution, like the three major dictatorships of the 20th century – I say "major" because there have been more, Cambodia and Romania among them – and like the New England Puritan regime before it, Gilead has utopian idealism flowing through its veins, coupled with a high-minded principle, its ever-present shadow, sublegal opportunism, and the propensity of the powerful to indulge in behind-the-scenes sensual delights forbidden to everyone else.
(11) Like many a child of the manse he reacted against the puritanism of his childhood without abandoning its high-mindedness or sense of moral certainty.
(12) That you thought the American response to erotic capital had been perverted by puritanism.
(13) The sales slowdown was particularly acute at the beginning of the year, which has become increasingly popular for some post-Christmas puritanism.
(14) His choice of collaborators and repertory served the puritanical rigour that illuminated his productions there, as well as with Joint Stock and the National Theatre, from landmark new plays, such as Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) and Lear (1972), to revelatory versions of classics, including a 1963 production of The Recruiting Officer with Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith.
(15) Relying on the evidence of the King's own letters and frank comments from his Puritan critics, most historians assume that his relations with some of these men were sexual.
(16) It is felt that the current belief of greater homosexuality in actors, as compared to the general population, is a product of our Puritan heritage, the actor's unconventionality, and of public flaunting of the homoerotic behavior of that portion of actors that are homosexual.
(17) The Dome was the core of the dream for the new Capital, which would no longer be called Berlin (a name that, to the puritanical Hitler, carried unpleasant associations of sin and relativism), but the more ancient-sounding Germania.
(18) The Entertainer is his diagnosis of the sickness that is currently afflicting our slap-happy breed.” Kenneth Tynan on The Entertainer “A puritanical element has always been there in me.
(19) Sondheim was compelled to write the statement following a New Yorker feature last week, which reported him telling a group of drama teachers that Disney had removed some of the racier material in the musical thanks to "puritanical ethics" in American society.
(20) It is not clear where this thread of Puritanism comes from within Apple.