prettified

Updated: May 1, 2025

This has a prettified and pleasant sound in speaking of a great, or rather of a big, nation. But what of it? What is the fact? What do we wish we could believe is the fact? What is there either in our own interests or the interests of others that can really be done and done now about the fact if it is a fact by any real person or body of persons in America?

Gerald Stanley Lee - The Ghost in the White House : Some suggestions as to how a hundred million people (who are supposed in a vague, helpless way to haunt the white house) can make themselves felt with a president, how they can back him up, express themselves to him, be expressed by him, and get what they want

And then, looking at me shrewdly: "I wonder if it isn't a very unfortunate thing for you to have met him." I showed him radiantly how it was the world we must know, the world as it was, not a world expurgated and prettified with optimistic rainbows. "Yes, yes," said he; "but this badness is such an easy, lazy explanation. Won't you be tempted to use it, instead of trying to understand people?"

Robert Louis Stevenson - The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 9

'Yes, said he, 'I'm afraid that is a bad man. And then looking at me shrewdly: 'I wonder if it isn't a very unfortunate thing for you to have met him. I showed him radiantly how it was the world we must know, the world as it was, not a world expurgated and prettified with optimistic rainbows. 'Yes, yes, said he; 'but this badness is such an easy, lazy explanation.

Robert Louis Stevenson - Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin