(n.) A forked tool used by clothiers in dressing cloth.
(n.) To dress with, or as with, a preen; to trim or dress with the beak, as the feathers; -- said of birds.
(n.) To trim up, as trees.
Example Sentences:
(1) "Anne Hathaway at least tried to sing and dance and preen along to the goings on, but Franco seemed distant, uninterested and content to keep his Cheshire-cat-meets-smug smile on display throughout."
(2) His running here was unstinting and he doubled his tally with a clinical finish after a first touch too smart for Pogatetz, preening perhaps after giving Boro a sniff of reprieve.
(3) Having started out preening (he tells a former colleague that he lives "the life of Riley"), he ends up howling alone on a small rock, the decision to adorn himself with a beautiful young wife having stolen his stature, robbed him of his dignity.
(4) What's more, his genial stiffness and shy self-awareness give him a kind of awkward dignity compared to the preening smugness of Cruz.
(5) He remembers Obama's incoming cabinet posing for portraits in the White House during the height of the crisis: “what a weird and preening thing for us to do while the world is burning”.
(6) 'Jonathan Saunders, Preen, Berardi, Kane and JW Anderson are on fire' Those are the names you will be raving about now.
(7) Romney's event is being organised by Scott Preen, a London company that specialises in high-profile political fundraising parties.
(8) If the Packham show emphasised a disconnect between the fashion industry's quest for trends and pure red carpet dressing, then the Preen show later in the day underlined how a move to the US can give a British label a healthy dollop of slickness.
(9) At best, these corporate-dominated panels are mostly useless: preening sessions in which chief executives exercise messiah complexes.
(10) Total lipid was extracted from chicken (Gallus domesticus) epidermis, leg scale, claws, feathers and preen glands and analyzed by quantitative thin-layer chromatography.
(11) Comparatively higher activity was observed in the extent of ambulation and rearing at 5 weeks old, rearing and preening at 7 weeks old, and preening and defecation at 11 weeks old in the Sprague-Dawley rats compared with the Wistar rats.
(12) In his preening, know-it-all professional arrogance, Cruise thinks he's bulletproof, but the mouse roars, and the hitman pays (incidentally, when casting a soullessly efficient, emotionally unavailable professional, could there be a more perfect candidate than Cruise?).
(13) The animals showed depressed response of preening on day 2 and 6.
(14) In 1909, the American illustrator Rose O’Neill drew a comic strip about “kewpies” (taken from cupid) – preening babylike creatures with tiny wings and huge heads, which were handed out as carnival prizes and capered around Jell-O ads (to this day, Kewpie Mayonnaise, introduced in 1925, is the top-selling brand in Japan).
(15) Trichobilharzia ocellata cercariae attach readily to the foot skin of their duck host, but poorly to preen-gland contents.
(16) Jane, a journalist in her 40s, thinks so: "I won't stay long in the weights room," she says: "The men are preening themselves.
(17) In the short-term, times spent feeding, drinking and preening decreased.
(18) Daily decrease was observed in ambulation, rearing and preening responses, with maximum decrement on the seventh day of Dimecron intoxication.
(19) From day 9, the preening response exhibited a continuous increasing pattern until the last day of the experiment.
(20) Power is meaningless unless it’s displayed, enacted: hence Vladimir Putin’s bare-chested preening or his sessions of bone-crushing judo .
Vanity
Definition:
(n.) The quality or state of being vain; want of substance to satisfy desire; emptiness; unsubstantialness; unrealness; falsity.
(n.) An inflation of mind upon slight grounds; empty pride inspired by an overweening conceit of one's personal attainments or decorations; an excessive desire for notice or approval; pride; ostentation; conceit.
(n.) That which is vain; anything empty, visionary, unreal, or unsubstantial; fruitless desire or effort; trifling labor productive of no good; empty pleasure; vain pursuit; idle show; unsubstantial enjoyment.
(n.) One of the established characters in the old moralities and puppet shows. See Morality, n., 5.
Example Sentences:
(1) With most big stars, the vanity and the power and the money take over.
(2) She believes her explorations – of their vanities, their blindnesses, their cruelties, of the brief moments in which they attain goodness, or glimpse a kind of realistic, unselfish love – to be of urgent importance.
(3) Aesthetic surgery crosses the dividing line between surgery for reconstruction and alteration of deviations (which do not in themselves constitute objective deformities) and is sometimes even performed without medical indication, but just for the gratification of individual vanity.
(4) So how did Vanity Fair decide to illustrate this heartfelt and rather astonishing interview?
(5) Using various self-report indices of these constructs we found that (a) defensive self-enhancement is composed of two orthogonal components: grandiosity and social desirability; (b) grandiosity and social desirability independently predict self-esteem and may represent distinct confounds in the measurement of self-esteem, (c) narcissism is positively related to grandiose self-enhancement (as opposed to social desirability), (d) narcissism is positively associated with both defensive and nondefensive self-esteem, and (e) authority, self-sufficiency, and vanity are the narcissistic elements most indicative of nondefensive self-esteem.
(6) "I've got a few men I respect very much and one would be Frank Gehry ," Pitt told Vanity Fair.
(7) Vanity Fair's contributing editor, Sarah Ellison, said Abramson was eminently prepared for the top job.
(8) A correlational analysis of the 7-factor components of the NPI (Authority, Exhibitionism, Superiority, Vanity, Exploitativeness, Entitlement, and Self-Sufficiency) and the MMPI validity, clinical, commonly scored, and content scales suggests that the seven NPI components reflect different levels of psychological maladjustment.
(9) By the time the guests have their fill of caviar-stuffed potatoes and get in their limos to the Vanity Fair party across town, most are sufficiently well lubricated to deal with one another: I walk in to see Benedict Cumberbatch standing by the bar with Joan Collins, while Patrick Stewart and Jared Leto are expressing mutual admiration for one another nearby.
(10) Janine di Giovanni is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the author of Ghosts by Daylight (Bloomsbury).
(11) But also, how cool that you are all talking about that.’” The film has opened to mainly negative reviews, with the Guardian’s Henry Barnes feeling that the compromises Emmerich has made “ leave Stonewall feeling neutered ” while Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson called it “ alarmingly clunky ”.
(12) Vanity Fair and the New Yorker have said they will not host parties either.
(13) Condé Nast's Vanity Fair was the worst performer among the big name titles in the sector in print, reporting sales of 81,344, down 8% period-on-period and 16.8% year-on-year.
(14) In a rare interview with Vanity Fair, the Oscar-winning director of Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist said the arrest hit him harder than any incident since the murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the Manson family in 1969, as well as the subsequent media circus that followed.
(15) It’s about vanity and a desire to splash the cash.
(16) You got to love the Tories they're happy to spend taxpayers money (the've increased debt by £555 billion since George Osborne took office in 2010, ) on big vanity projects.
(17) I also believe that it is cruel to take a baby away from its mother.” In a 2005 Vanity Fair interview on the subject, Dolce said he would love an “entire football team” of children, but: “I have the small handicap of being gay so having a child is not possible for me.” They refer constantly to their business as their baby.
(18) When the case came to court, Mr Justice Eady refused to allow Vanity Fair to give the jury the full details of the 1977 attack.
(19) Prince undertook a six-month tour to promote 1999, where he was joined on the bill by his proteges the Time and a new all-female group, Vanity 6, the latter seemingly an embodiment of Prince’s sexual fantasies.
(20) Sometimes, it seems, calling oneself a feminist is a personal act of vanity, with no wider resonance – witness Louise Mensch the feminist , Theresa May the feminist and, most fantastically, Margaret Thatcher the feminist, even though her supporters will happily tell you that the woman stood for no one but herself.