fatuity

This conviction was strengthened by his vanity and conceit, a conceit to the point of fatuity. Pyotr Petrovitch, who had made his way up from insignificance, was morbidly given to self-admiration, had the highest opinion of his intelligence and capacities, and sometimes even gloated in solitude over his image in the glass.

Jasper was sent for, the watch and shirt-pin were identified, Neville was detained, and the wildest frenzy and fatuity of evil report rose against him.

"At least, I am now at liberty to believe, without too much fatuity, that you love another," said the young man, in a caressing tone, "and I repeat that I am really interested for the count."

Going into the Market Place he accosted in a feigned voice a maiden, the orphan daughter of a noble Polygon, whose affection in former days he had sought in vain; and by a series of deceptions -- aided, on the one side, by a string of lucky accidents too long to relate, and on the other, by an almost inconceivable fatuity and neglect of ordinary precautions on the part of the relations of the bride -- he succeeded in consummating the marriage.

He probably thought the display worth very little from a picturesque point of view; the weak voice; the colourless personality as incapable of an attitude as a bed-post, the very fatuity of the clenched hand so ineffectual at that time and place-- no, it wasn't worth much.

"Upon my word," said he, in his tone of intrepid fatuity, "here is a charming creature!

Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes--a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens--go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity.

He even noticed two or three gestures which, in his fatuity, he had thought she kept for him: a way of throwing her head back when she was amused, as if to taste her laugh before she let it out, and a trick of sinking her lids slowly when anything charmed or moved her.

'I don't know all I have done, in my fatuity,' said Mr.

We end by knowing our peril, which is better than fatuity: before a man may be healed, he must recognize his sickness." This diagnosis is what modernism provides-what perhaps only modernism can provide.

Dodd declared: "To suggest somehow that [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] are in trouble is simply not accurate." Such a checkered history and evidence of fatuity might have embarrassed a less honorable man.

During his trip to Ghana last July, Obama displayed incredible fatuity when, in his address to Ghana's parliament, he seemed to diminish the horrors of the European enslavement of Africans while absolving the former American and European slave-holding and colonial governments of their crimes against Africa and the African people.