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idiosyncrasy
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  • But she told me the crucial thing is to tell them the specific idiosyncratic ways in which I related to them.†   (source)
  • The wind propelled the snow against the sides of barns and homes, and Ishmael could hear it whistling through the wing window's rubber molding, which had been loose now for many years: it had been loose back when his father was alive, one of the car's small idiosyncrasies, part of the reason he was loath to part with it.†   (source)
  • He was, I think, deliberately playing up the idiosyncrasies of his personality.†   (source)
  • He is the only boy who knows his peculiarities, his idiosyncrasies, who knows how to get the best of him.†   (source)
  • But even if you ignored her other idiosyncrasies—the fact that she drove a moped to the salon unless it was raining, favored clothing with polka dots, and viewed her Elvis collectibles as "fine art"—Mabel would still be regarded as positively odd for something she'd done over a quarter century ago.†   (source)
  • He had no taste for sham, tact or pretension, and his credo as a professional soldier was unified and concise: he believed that the young men who took orders from him should be willing to give up their lives for the ideals, aspirations and idiosyncrasies of the old men he took orders from.†   (source)
  • "It's my idio-idio-idiosyncrasy," replied the gander.†   (source)
  • Obviously, as vital as the physical appearances was language-not merely the fluent use of English but the mastery of linguistic idiosyncrasies, the dialects that were characteristic of specific locations.†   (source)
  • I knew I drove her crazy with my idiosyncrasies.†   (source)
  • Under Eva's distant eye, and prey to her idiosyncrasies, her own children grew up stealthily: Pearl married at fourteen and moved to Flint, Michigan, from where she posted frail letters to her mother with two dollars folded into the writing paper.†   (source)
  • Many of these early moguls spoke idiosyncratic English.†   (source)
  • She was the first woman I ever knew who wore slacks on a regular basis, and it was one of those idiosyncrasies that separated her from her neighbors South of Broad.†   (source)
  • Never one where Chekhov's talent is matched, nuance for nuance, idiosyncrasy for idiosyncrasy, by every soul onstage.†   (source)
  • Even though they had both become reasonably tolerant of the idiosyncrasies involved in my professional duties, I did not want to try them too far and so I continued to postpone the analytical work, until one October morning when they went away together on a caribou hunting trip, leaving me in sole possession of the camp.†   (source)
  • For the initiate ours is a cruel language, its freaky orthography and idiosyncrasies never so absurdly apparent as on the printed page, and Sophie's skill at reading and writing always lagged behind her—to me—fetchingly erratic speech.†   (source)
  • There was nothing idiosyncratic about Brinker unless you saw him from behind; I did as he turned to close the door after him.   (source)
    idiosyncratic = distinctive and peculiar to an individual
  • The museum is idiosyncratic and interesting.
  • Looking back over the text, it strikes me as highly idiosyncratic.†   (source)
  • Dashes of color and idiosyncrasy marked the scene from beginning to end.†   (source)
  • So far, I haven't found any idiosyncrasies of his that drive me crazy.†   (source)
  • In whose view inadequacy was mere idiosyncrasy, a character trait rather than a deficiency?†   (source)
  • Scott Fischer's team was a congenial and cohesive group; most of Pittman's teammates took her idiosyncrasies in stride and seemed to have little trouble accepting her into their midst.†   (source)
  • But Chris, with his idiosyncratic logic, came up with an elegant solution to this dilemma: He simply got rid of the map.†   (source)
  • Our churches, known the world over for their idiosyncratic beauty, for their brightly colored spires and improbable cupolas, we raze one by one.†   (source)
  • She'd always pull back enough in her interactions with her classmates to give herself room to quietly observe them, so that when she got home she could practice imitating their accents, their idiosyncrasies, their style.†   (source)
  • A man may have been born in a city famous for its idiosyncratic culture and yet, the very habits, fashions, and ideas that exalt that city in the eyes of the world may make no sense to him at all.†   (source)
  • Morse's drinking would go from being a quaint idiosyncrasy to something from one of those old school-guidance films, and that is not what Dexter wants.†   (source)
  • He borrows the figure of Christ joining the disciples on the road to Emmaus in The Raste Land (1922), uses the Christmas story in "Journey of the Magi" (1927), offers a fairly idiosyncratic sort of Lenten consciousness in "Ash-Wednesday" (1930).†   (source)
  • But the curious thing, the contradiction, is that I was standing in the middle of a fenced enclosure in a bungalow slum looking up at the spires of the great strange architectural cluster known as the Watts Towers, an idiosyncrasy out of someone's innocent anarchist visions, and the more I looked, the more I thought of Jimmy.†   (source)
  • How is it that all the weird, idiosyncratic things that really cool kids do end up in the mainstream?†   (source)
  • More important, he knew that Pollard was the jockey best able to protect his horse's idiosyncratic body from injury.†   (source)
  • Ten million bobbing heads that ride above the tideline of taxi stripes, all brain-waved differently, and yes the street abounds in idiosyncrasy, in the human veer, but you have to go to roof level to see the thing distinct, preserved in masonry and brass.†   (source)
  • …in essence, meant that students themselves became arbiters of what subjects were to be taught, and grammar, by jingo (or Ringo), was not one of them; (2) the notion that in a democratic society language must accommodate itself to the whims, idiosyncrasies, dialects, and sheer ignorance of underprivileged minorities, especially if these happened to be black, Hispanic, and, later on, female or homosexual; (3) the introduction by more and more incompetent English teachers, products of the…†   (source)
  • I have spent a lot of time, in this book, talking about the idiosyncrasies of the way we relate to new information and to each other.†   (source)
  • Yet in the end, when all of those separate and idiosyncratic chains were completed, half of those letters ended up in the hands of Jacobs, Jones, and Brown.†   (source)
  • His writing had an idiosyncratic charm.†   (source)
  • It depends on the personal idiosyncrasy of the patient towards that particular drug.†   (source)
  • His manner was genial and his speech idiosyncratic.†   (source)
  • Thus stood the two Harrys, neither playing a very pretty part, over against the worthy professor, mocking one another, watching one another, and spitting at one another, while as always in such predicaments, the eternal question presented itself whether all this was simple stupidity and human frailty, a common depravity, or whether this sentimental egoism and perversity, this slovenliness and two-facedness of feeling was merely a personal idiosyncrasy of the Steppenwolves.†   (source)
  • This idiosyncrasy-the term he uses in his diary-was warmly approved of by Tarrou; indeed, one of his appreciative comments ends on the exclamation: "At last!"†   (source)
  • …her beauty merely that one thought of, one must remember the quivering thing, the living thing (they were carrying bricks up a little plank as he watched them), and work it into the picture; or if one thought of her simply as a woman, one must endow her with some freak of idiosyncrasy—she did not like admiration—or suppose some latent desire to doff her royalty of form as if her beauty bored her and all that men say of beauty, and she wanted only to be like other people, insignificant.†   (source)
  • One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.†   (source)
  • The young artist wearing his whiskers into the lobby of the Ritz will be glad to explain his idiosyncrasy.†   (source)
  • It is not vanity; for I am emptied of ambition; I do not remember my special gifts, or idiosyncrasy, or the marks I bear on my person; eyes, nose or mouth.†   (source)
  • The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation thatis prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment.†   (source)
  • He was then in his late fifties, but it was his idiosyncrasy to seem much older than his years; to see him one might have put him at seventy, to hear him speak at nearly eighty.†   (source)
  • X Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own code of morality.†   (source)
  • After all, he was afraid only of the car and Link, and that fear was an idiosyncrasy.†   (source)
  • I acknowledge to this ridiculous idiosyncrasy, as a reason why I would give them a little more play.†   (source)
  • One idiosyncrasy for which she often apologized, she found it excessively difficult to conquer.†   (source)
  • It amused her to think that any one as rich as Mr. Percy Gryce should be shy; but she was gifted with treasures of indulgence for such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his timidity might serve her purpose better than too much assurance.†   (source)
  • And when ordinary fellows like you and me attempt to cope with their idiosyncrasies the result is bungling.†   (source)
  • His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with indescribable idiosyncrasy, lent a little forward, tripped, with his hands behind his back and his eyes still a little hawklike; he tripped through London, towards Westminster, observing.†   (source)
  • Cartlett's interest in Jude whatever it might have been when Arabella was new to him, had plainly flagged since her charms and her idiosyncrasies, her supernumerary hair-coils, and her optional dimples, were becoming as a tale that is told.†   (source)
  • At the time, I set it down to some idiosyncratic, personal distaste, and merely wondered at the acuteness of the symptoms; but I have since had reason to believe the cause to lie much deeper in the nature of man, and to turn on some nobler hinge than the principle of hatred.†   (source)
  • Perhaps it was a learned dislike, perhaps an inborn idiosyncrasy— whatever it was, he abhorred banging doors and could have slapped anyone guilty of slamming one within earshot.†   (source)
  • Lily met the announcement with her usual composure, though her experience of Bertha's idiosyncrasies would not have led her to include the neighbourly instinct among them; and Mrs. Gormer, relieved to see that she gave no sign of surprise, went on with a deprecating laugh: "Of course what really brought her was curiosity—she made me take her all over the house.†   (source)
  • Far from ignoring idiosyncrasy, will, passion, impulse, whim, as factors in human action, I have placed them so nakedly on the stage that the elderly citizen, accustomed to see them clothed with the veil of manufactured logic about duty, and to disguise even his own impulses from himself in this way, finds the picture as unnatural as Carlyle's suggested painting of parliament sitting without its clothes.†   (source)
  • CHAPTER XXV THE NEW ACQUAINTANCE DESCRIBED Idiosyncrasy and vicissitude had combined to stamp Sergeant Troy as an exceptional being.†   (source)
  • Judea had been a Roman province eighty years and more—ample time for the Caesars to study the idiosyncrasies of the people—time enough, at least, to learn that the Jew, with all his pride, could be quietly governed if his religion were respected.†   (source)
  • The Doctor's wine was admirable, and it may be communicated to the reader that while he sipped it Morris reflected that a cellar-full of good liquor—there was evidently a cellar-full here—would be a most attractive idiosyncrasy in a father-in-law.†   (source)
  • It was written to me (as it told me in so many words), perhaps because it was the writer's idiosyncrasy to put that trust in me, perhaps because it was mine to justify it.†   (source)
  • But the mind within was beginning to use it as a mere waste tablet whereon to trace its idiosyncrasies as they developed themselves.†   (source)
  • This mode of death had been an idiosyncrasy with his family, for generations past; not often occurring, indeed, but, when it does occur, usually attacking individuals about the Judge's time of life, and generally in the tension of some mental crisis, or, perhaps, in an access of wrath.†   (source)
  • Thereupon promptly came to the surface that idiosyncrasy of Henchard's which had ruled his courses from the beginning and had mainly made him what he was.†   (source)
  • — That's all we've got,' said my aunt; with whom it was an idiosyncrasy, as it is with some horses, to stop very short when she appeared to be in a fair way of going on for a long while.†   (source)
  • Deriving his idiosyncrasies from both sides of the Channel, he showed at such junctures as the present the inelasticity of the Englishman, together with that blindness to the line where sentiment verges on mawkishness, characteristic of the French.†   (source)
  • But when it came to be understood, on the highest professional authority, that the event was a natural, and—except for some unimportant particulars, denoting a slight idiosyncrasy—by no means an unusual form of death, the public, with its customary alacrity, proceeded to forget that he had ever lived.†   (source)
  • In fact, the two perspectives are finally inseparable: serving as a repository of the past in an unlettered culture, the singer of epic aspired to be traditional, to retell the oldest stories without obvious novelty or idiosyncrasy; yet these same traditions were so profuse and so many-sided in their meanings that only the strongest poetic vision could have wrought from them the definitive shaping that is The Iliad.†   (source)
  • But its chief excuse is its human interest, for it prods deeply into national idiosyncrasies and ways of mind, and that sort of prodding is always entertaining.†   (source)
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