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flippant
in a sentence

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  • But Ron was careful not to be flippant about Voldemort over the next few days.†   (source)
  • Whatever there is to know," I say; but that's too flippant.†   (source)
  • His sudden shifts between flippant and intense are unnerving.†   (source)
  • In this, she resembled her mother and brother —and yet Mrs. Barbour's restraint, and Andy's, were somehow very different from Kitsey's way of making a flippant or trivializing comment whenever anyone brought up something serious.†   (source)
  • Hana answers flippantly, just the way she should, but she's smiling now, and nodding at me.†   (source)
  • 'Quiet,' hissed Holly, worried by the tone of Foaly's usually flippant voice.†   (source)
  • "That was flippant," she said, "I'm sorry."†   (source)
  • Don't speak flippantly or without thought, because your words will have impact far beyond what you intend.†   (source)
  • "Okay, then," I said flippantly, trying to alleviate the suddenly tense atmosphere.†   (source)
  • I mean I think I was clear: I'm not being flippant.†   (source)
  • "Well," I said at last, aiming to ease the tension with flippancy, "one of these days I just might.†   (source)
  • But your flippancy is wearing on my patience.†   (source)
  • She made a flippant gesture.†   (source)
  • "I actually— I was going to come see you guys," I say, trying to sound flippant, harried.†   (source)
  • I loved my job as a columnist; loved the daily interaction I had with readers; loved the freedom to pick my own topics and be as serious or as flippant as I wanted to be.†   (source)
  • "The things I have to confess aren't the kind of things you tell your flippant bio partner," he said.†   (source)
  • I had no idea if her expression was flippant or grave or what.†   (source)
  • "I'm waiting for you," he said, trying to regain (or acquire) some masculine flippancy.†   (source)
  • The memory of Janice and Martin is a bit too raw for me to be flippant.†   (source)
  • He had no right to dismiss her jealousy so flippantly.†   (source)
  • "We knew," Ricardo said with an air of flippancy.†   (source)
  • …stood "among the few surviving, steady, tried patriots" whose services to the country were of a kind almost beyond compare : Bred in the old school of politics, his principles are founded on the experience of ages, and bid defiance to French flippancies and modern crudities…… Always great, and though sometimes alone, all weak and personal motives were forgotten in public energy and the security of the sacred liberties of his country…… Deeply versed in legal lore, profoundly skilled in…†   (source)
  • Just because Bryan didn't smell orange blossoms when the word marriage came up was no reason to be flippant.†   (source)
  • He had always opposed my militant flippancy about the plebe system, and I knew it would offend him deeply to see it directed at newly ordained aspirants to the invigorating rituals of that system.†   (source)
  • Judge Glass was at his most belligerent, Maynard at his most flippant.†   (source)
  • He had always been flippant and featherbrained: now he was a serious scholar.†   (source)
  • But Norfolk said if Wolsey fell MORE (No longer flippant) If Wolsey fell, the splash would swamp a few small boats like ours.†   (source)
  • Jimmy had been adding his usual flippant commentary.†   (source)
  • One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things.   (source)
  • Flippantly, Valentine would ask, Why not make all men Shadowhunters, then?†   (source)
  • It's all the same," she says flippantly, walking back to the bed.†   (source)
  • "Off and on:' I said flippantly as I sat down.†   (source)
  • Matters of the histories are never established flippantly," Ciphus said.†   (source)
  • "Trespassing," I said flippantly.†   (source)
  • Simon sighed internally; he could tell that under the flippancy, Jace was completely serious in his offer.†   (source)
  • I'm already sliding into flippancy, which goes with high school, but also I can't see what she's getting at.†   (source)
  • Despite the flippancy of her final comment, he hoped that she would follow him, but somehow knew she wouldn't.†   (source)
  • She could hear the nerves under his flippant tone.†   (source)
  • Unemotional, flippant.†   (source)
  • If you were being flippant about it, you'd say that all it took was a little bit of fire, really, and some human shouting to go with it.†   (source)
  • "Now you're just being flippant.†   (source)
  • He made a flippant gesture.†   (source)
  • Federick the Flippant.†   (source)
  • Despite her sometimes flippant remarks and her occasional teasing, he knew what she was really saying: that no one blamed him, that it wasn't his fault.†   (source)
  • With someone else, with anyone else, he would have said something flippant or changed the subject until he figured out another way to get through her door.†   (source)
  • It was that atmosphere of earnestness he provoked that led Milkman to talking about his family more than he would normally do and that also led him to defend with flippant remarks the kind of life he led.†   (source)
  • His remark was not intended for flippancy nor even derogation.†   (source)
  • I divide the causes of human laughter into Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy.†   (source)
  • This was the first time he had ever talked to her in this manner, as one human being to another, talked as other people talked, without flippancy, mockery or riddles.†   (source)
  • If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter.†   (source)
  • This was not flippancy either.†   (source)
  • But flippancy is the best of all.†   (source)
  • As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention.†   (source)
  • "Now, young man, we'll have no more flippancy," old Henry Thompson ordered.†   (source)
  • That's my middle name," retorted Carley, flippantly.†   (source)
  • You look left and I'll— ALEC: (Flippantly) Hadn't you better send the butler through the cellar?†   (source)
  • "Don't banter me," she said, wounded at what appeared to be his flippancy.†   (source)
  • It was lucky that the turn of his mind tended to flippancy.†   (source)
  • "La! man," she said with a return of her assumed flippancy, "you are astonishing.†   (source)
  • "Hello, Doug Fairbanks," she said flippantly.†   (source)
  • "La, man!" she replied flippantly, "how serious you look all of a sudden….†   (source)
  • "Not its flippancy, father," said Mary, quickly, fearing that her mother would be displeased.†   (source)
  • Indeed, there was too lightsome a tone of flippancy all through the paper.†   (source)
  • Being young, he did not approve of her flippancy.†   (source)
  • "How can you treat me so flippantly!" said his mother, turning again to him with a tearful look.†   (source)
  • Nothing could be in worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered somewhat stiffly: "Yes, you have been away a very long time."†   (source)
  • You put the matter more flippantly, Mr. Holmes, than you would probably do if you were brought into personal contact with these things.†   (source)
  • His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell upon him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack.†   (source)
  • In the ecstatic solemnity with which she swore her faith to him the ordinary sensibilities of sex seemed a flippancy.†   (source)
  • There was never here any of that flashing humour which made the other masters suspect him of flippancy.†   (source)
  • "You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added, putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her.†   (source)
  • But Clara wearied of his flippancy.†   (source)
  • I think your flippancy is quite inane.'†   (source)
  • There was no doubt that he was a fine scholar, and he was engaged on a work which was quite in the right tradition: he was writing a treatise on the trees in Latin literature; but he talked of it flippantly, as though it were a pastime of no great importance, like billiards, which engaged his leisure but was not to be considered with seriousness.†   (source)
  • "La! my friend," she said, with the same assumed flippancy of manner, "then you are where you were before, aren't you? and you can let me enjoy the last strophe of the ARIA.†   (source)
  • "It does seem simple, doesn't it?" she said, with a final bitter attempt at flippancy, "when you want to kill a chicken …. you take hold of it …. then you wring its neck …. it's only the chicken who does not find it quite so simple.†   (source)
  • Rebecca's wit, cleverness, and flippancy made her speedily the vogue in London among a certain class.†   (source)
  • I advised you to conquer your idleness and flippancy, and to work your way into an honorable profession and live on it and not upon me.†   (source)
  • He thought that he had already had time to lose his temper with Ivan, to show coolness to his brother, and to talk flippantly with Katavasov.†   (source)
  • He encouraged her to speak her mind, to be flippant and daring.†   (source)
  • Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made.†   (source)
  • So sincere, so humorless, that the legion commander withheld the flippant refusal he was about to make.†   (source)
  • "I should cry into my pillow every night," said Scarlett, meaning to be flippant, but he took the statement at face value and went red with pleasure.†   (source)
  • She missed him, missed his light flippant touch in anecdotes that made her shout with laughter, his sardonic grin that reduced troubles to their proper proportions, missed even his jeers that stung her to angry retort.†   (source)
  • But the people in the Berghof dining hall were certainly not so flippant and unsteady as all that.†   (source)
  • He did not mind being flippant about New York, but disliked to hear any one else take the same tone.†   (source)
  • She realized, in the taxicab, that he was wearing a soft gray suit, a soft easy hat, a flippant tie.†   (source)
  • "By Jove, if I weren't flippant, I should hang myself,' he thought cheerfully.†   (source)
  • It is rather too bad of Fred to repeat my flippant speeches to Mr. Farebrother.†   (source)
  • Was it likely that a clergyman and a gentleman would refer to his engagement in a manner so flippant?†   (source)
  • All along, Marguerite had been expecting it; she would not show fear, she was determined to seem unconcerned, flippant even.†   (source)
  • During all those years he had never heard from any of his masters a flippant word: it was they who had taught him christian doctrine and urged him to live a good life and, when he had fallen into grievous sin, it was they who had led him back to grace.†   (source)
  • The clerk was flippant and urban.†   (source)
  • …of the sort called "practical"; not once did he cease warring on the post hoc propter hoc conclusions which still make up most medical lore; not once did he fail to be hated by his colleagues, who were respectful to his face, uncomfortable in feeling his ironic power, but privily joyous to call him Mephisto, Diabolist, Killjoy, Pessimist, Destructive Critic, Flippant Cynic, Scientific Bounder Lacking in Dignity and Seriousness, Intellectual Snob, Pacifist, Anarchist, Atheist, Jew.†   (source)
  • Ah yes, life is dying— there's no sense in trying to sugarcoat it—une destruction organique, as some Frenchman once called it in that flippant way the Frenchies have.†   (source)
  • When Gottlieb insisted to Tubbs at lunch, "I am villing to admit every virtue of the French—I am very fond of that so individual people—but on the theory of probabilities I suggest that there must be some good Germans out of sixty millions," then Col. Dr. Tubbs commanded, "In this time of world tragedy, it does not seem to me particularly becoming to try to be flippant, Dr. Gottlieb!"†   (source)
  • It made Miriam bitter to think that he should throw away his soul for this flippant traffic of triviality with Clara.†   (source)
  • I had no idea you were intimate with her, or I should never have talked in this flippant, superficial way.†   (source)
  • And then a blond young man, sitting sideways on a lounge chair clear at the front, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, replied in a flippant voice, "Wouldn't think of it.†   (source)
  • If he were jolly and, as she put it, flippant, she waited till he came back to her, till the change had taken place in him again, and he was wrestling with his own soul, frowning, passionate in his desire for understanding.†   (source)
  • Whether she wore a low middy collar or dressed reticently for school in a black suit with a high-necked blouse, she was airy, flippant.†   (source)
  • Beavers, human Beavers, were everywhere: thirty-second degree Beavers in gray sack suits and decent derbies, more flippant Beavers in crash summer coats and straw hats, rustic Beavers in shirt sleeves and frayed suspenders; but whatever his caste-symbols, every Beaver was distinguished by an enormous shrimp-colored ribbon lettered in silver, "Sir Knight and Brother, U. F. O. B., Annual State Convention."†   (source)
  • Carpenters had torn out the partition between front parlor and back parlor, thrown it into a long room on which she lavished yellow and deep blue; a Japanese obi with an intricacy of gold thread on stiff ultramarine tissue, which she hung as a panel against the maize wall; a couch with pillows of sapphire velvet and gold bands; chairs which, in Gopher Prairie, seemed flippant.†   (source)
  • The church was their society and their standard; they went to Sunday service, Sunday School, Christian Endeavor, missionary lectures, church suppers, precisely as they had at home; they agreed that ambassadors and flippant newspapermen and infidel scientists of the bureaus were equally wicked and to be avoided; and by cleaving to Tincomb Church they kept their ideals from all contamination.†   (source)
  • Only Sir Andrew Ffoulkes, whose every thought since he had met Suzanne de Tournay seemed keener, more gentle, more innately sympathetic, noted the curious look of intense longing, of deep and hopeless passion, with which the inane and flippant Sir Percy followed the retreating figure of his brilliant wife.†   (source)
  • Philip was silent too, for he did not quite know what to say that would fit the circumstance; and he was terribly afraid that, if he said something flippant, Miss Wilkinson would break down before his uncle and make a scene.†   (source)
  • One was the flippant contempt with which the guests evidently regarded her uncle, and the other, the easy insolence of their manner towards herself.†   (source)
  • Fauchelevent belonged, in fact, to that species, which the impertinent and flippant vocabulary of the last century qualified as demi-bourgeois, demi-lout, and which the metaphors showered by the chateau upon the thatched cottage ticketed in the pigeon-hole of the plebeian: rather rustic, rather citified; pepper and salt.†   (source)
  • Mr. Heathcliff having overheard the conversation, as well as I, smiled when he saw him go; but immediately afterwards cast a look of singular aversion on the flippant pair, who remained chattering in the door-way: the boy finding animation enough while discussing Hareton's faults and deficiencies, and relating anecdotes of his goings on; and the girl relishing his pert and spiteful sayings, without considering the ill-nature they evinced.†   (source)
  • [He puts his hat and stick on the table, and perches himself with a vault on the clerk's stool, looking at her with every appearance of being in a specially restless, teasing, flippant mood].†   (source)
  • Against certain facts he was helpless: against Will Ladislaw's existence, his defiant stay in the neighborhood of Lowick, and his flippant state of mind with regard to the possessors of authentic, well-stamped erudition: against Dorothea's nature, always taking on some new shape of ardent activity, and even in submission and silence covering fervid reasons which it was an irritation to think of: against certain notions and likings which had taken possession of her mind in relation to…†   (source)
  • I was tired, and disturbed over the incident, but covered it with flippancy.†   (source)
  • Lastly at the head of the board was the young poet who found a refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical inquisition in the convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while to right and left of him were accommodated the flippant prognosticator, fresh from the hippodrome, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the dust of travel and combat and stained by the mire of an indelible dishonour, but from whose steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation…†   (source)
  • The mockeries are not you, Underneath them and within them I see you lurk, I pursue you where none else has pursued you, Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom'd routine, if these conceal you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me, The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside.†   (source)
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