Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: April 30, 2025
"I wish I knew whether it was really good," said May, lifting her golden head in deprecation of a possibly misguided admiration. "It is so beautiful that I'm dreadfully afraid it is meretricious." "It is really good," said a voice close at hand. "I think we may set our minds at rest about that." The voice was its own passport and no one thought of taking the remark amiss.
"These people," said he, "know nothing about music; anything is good enough for drinkers of warm water. I will give them something suited to their taste." Whereupon he played a very trivial and commonplace French air, which he disguised with all manner of meretricious flourishes, and achieved a great success.
As for life-likeness, what's the old dame talking about! I never saw such eyes! Not a hint of meretricious emphasis on their luster and yet they fairly flame."
And as it is said that the Russian has in him something of the child and something of the oriental, such a style may be quite sincere, and have even a certain simplicity in its splendour. It is genuine of its kind; it was built for those who like it; and those who do not like it can look at something else. This sort of thing may be called tawdry, but it is not what I call meretricious.
Catherine gave a long, low sigh; she tried to stifle it, for she had made up her mind that it was wrong to make a parade of her trouble, and to endeavour to act upon her father by the meretricious aid of emotion.
Like a postulant at a convent, she might well have relinquished such meretricious spells of lust months ago had she not held two opinions in favor of this "open relationship" remaining such. This sauntering away from domestic life always brought newness to marital vows upon one's return; and being shaken up in promiscuous rendezvous made the brain more lithe in generating ideas.
I don't want any more of your meretricious persiflage. 'Is it really persiflage? she mocked, her face really relaxing into laughter. She interpreted it, that he had made a deep confession of love to her. But he was so absurd in his words, also. They were silent for many minutes, she was pleased and elated like a child. His concentration broke, he began to look at her simply and naturally.
What we drag in so obstinately will bring but a cheap and unstable pleasure, while a double beauty will thereby be lost or obscured first, the unlooked-for beauty which a genuine and stable system of things could not but betray, and secondly the coveted beauty itself, which, being imported here into the wrong context, will be rendered meretricious and offensive to good taste.
There came a time when he had, as he believed, put away childish things, that, returning to these venerable trumpet-blasts, he asked himself, in the arrogance of youth, how these stale metaphors, these conventional phrases, these decorations as meretricious as stage jewellry, and metres that cantered along, as he told himself, like solemn old circus-horses, could have had the power to shake his voice and fill his eyes with tears, as he spoke them to Christian, who had so soon become his sole audience.
The means which they sometimes employed were no less whimsical than various: the lover of wine was invited to a public-house, where he might intoxicate himself; the glutton was tempted by the sight of ready-dressed turkies, fowls, sausages &c. suspended to a long pole; and the youth, inclined to libertinism, was seduced by the meretricious allurements of a well-tutored doxy.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking