All 16 Uses of
convention
in
The Age of Innocence
- "You've arranged it delightfully," he rejoined, alive to the flatness of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire to be simple and striking.†
Chpt 9conventional = normal or typical
- Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations; and there might even be one in which a woman naturally sensitive and aloof would yet, from the force of circumstances, from sheer defencelessness and loneliness, be drawn into a tie inexcusable by conventional standards.†
Chpt 11
- "Well—not if the woman, however injured, however irreproachable, has appearances in the least degree against her, has exposed herself by any unconventional action to—to offensive insinuations—" She drooped her head a little lower, and he waited again, intensely hoping for a flash of indignation, or at least a brief cry of denial.†
Chpt 12unconventional = not regarded as normalstandard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unconventional means not and reverses the meaning of conventional. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
- She ended with a conventional "Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return.†
Chpt 14conventional = normal or typical
- But unconventional?†
Chpt 23unconventional = not regarded as normalstandard prefix: The prefix "un-" in unconventional means not and reverses the meaning of conventional. This is the same pattern you see in words like unhappy, unknown, and unlucky.
- I hadn't thought of it, because I've just done something so much more unconventional.†
Chpt 23
- ...she had managed to brush away the conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other....
Chpt 23 *conventions = things regarded as normal
- Once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity, to make him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging convention to the winds.†
Chpt 29conventional = normal or typical
- Archer checked the conventional phrases of self-accusal that were crowding to his lips.†
Chpt 32
- Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views.†
Chpt 34
- This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.†
Chpt 1
- Old Mrs. Mingott had always professed a great admiration for Julius Beaufort, and there was a kind of kinship in their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through the conventions.†
Chpt 4
- Such verbal generosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern.†
Chpt 6
- "The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is supposed to be the collective interest: people cling to any convention that keeps the family together—protects the children, if there are any," he rambled on, pouring out all the stock phrases that rose to his lips in his intense desire to cover over the ugly reality which her silence seemed to have laid bare.†
Chpt 12
- Archer would have liked to join the travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions.†
Chpt 13
- Once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity, to make him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging convention to the winds.†
Chpt 29
Definitions:
-
(1)
(convention as in: teacher's convention) a large conference or meeting
-
(2)
(convention as in: conventional behavior) something regarded as normal or typical
-
(3)
(convention as in: The Geneva Convention) a written international agreement