staidness

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staid

(stād)

adj.

1. Characterized by sedateness and often a strait-laced sense of propriety; serious and conventional.

2. Fixed; permanent: "There is nothing settled, nothing staid in this universe" (Virginia Woolf).

[From obsolete staid, past participle of stay.]

staid′ly adv.

staid′ness n.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Noun

staidness - a trait of dignified seriousness

sedateness, solemness, solemnity

serious-mindedness, earnestness, seriousness, sincerity - the trait of being serious; "a lack of solemnity is not necessarily a lack of seriousness"- Robert Rice

staidness

noun

High seriousness of manner or bearing:

graveness, gravity, sedateness, sobriety, solemnity, solemnness.

Translations

staidness

[ˈsteɪdnɪs] N [of person] → seriedad f; [of clothes] → sobriedad f

Collins Spanish Dictionary - Complete and Unabridged 8th Edition 2005 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1971, 1988 © HarperCollins Publishers 1992, 1993, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2005

staidness

n → Gesetztheit f

Collins German Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged 7th Edition 2005. © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1980 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1997, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007

staidness

[ˈsteɪdnɪs] n → eccessiva posatezza

Collins Italian Dictionary 1st Edition © HarperCollins Publishers 1995

Mentioned in ?

References in classic literature ?

Sancho had not thought it worth while to hobble Rocinante, feeling sure, from what he knew of his staidness and freedom from incontinence, that all the mares in the Cordova pastures would not lead him into an impropriety.

View in context

He achieved a staidness, and calmness, and philosophic tolerance.

View in context

I have tried to attend to Hurston's own output as invested in forms of resilience--if not exactly resistance--that privilege the performative and the provisional over coherence and staidness. To draw from Hurston's own account of her early disorienting experiences reading Greek myths and adventure stories in Eatonville as a young girl, giving ourselves over to both the joy and the "anguish" that comes with reading Hurston may be the first step toward encountering her work without aspiring to resolve it--reading, rather, for "the drama of it," a motive that appears in her work to be capable of turning impracticable conditions into occasions for imagining their undoing.

Hard Romping: Zora Neale Hurston, White Women, and the Right to Play

It is significant that, in the current political context of a male-dominated monarchical-military dictatorship, the bourgeois values of self-respect, freedom, individual agency and social equality are borne by the young female character of Karaket, while the older, male character of Khun Muen represents the staidness, dutifulness, status-consciousness and hierarchy characteristic of traditional aristocracy.

Bupphesanniwat Fever: Gendered Nationalism and Middle-Class Views of Thailand's Political Predicament

(15) For academic David Payne, however, this focus on the transformative power of literature is revolutionary: 'Dead Poets presents the profound humanism of poetry as a political counterpoint to the staidness of education and society, assaulting the very ideas of conformity and mobility.' (16) Payne argues that these concerns situate the film within the genre of coming-of-age movies, which depict developing adolescent self-determination.

Taking on Tradition: Coming of Age and Conformity in Dead Poets Society

As the late Dennis O'Driscoll noted in "Peter Fallon Revisited"--"Peter's energising omnipresence lit a neon torch for a generation that had had its fill of staidness" (27).

The fulcrum of contemporary Irish poetry

As early as this just-cited letter, at age fifteen, he is beginning to construct a self-mythology in which an experience of freedom in the Maine wilderness stands opposed to the restraining staidness of official New England culture.

Hawthorne's backwoods Puritan: "Sir William Phips" and the democratic clown tradition

Sicillia may not excite with its regular interiors but you make concessions for the staidness because of the food, which is a happy amalgam of the best of Italy.

Sicilian Delight

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