All 13 Uses of

convention

in

This Side of Paradise

from Boston and the Knickerbocker families of New York; St. Paul's, with its great rinks; Pomfret and St. George's, prosperous and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which prepared the wealth of the Middle West for social success at Yale; Pawling, Westminster, Choate, Kent, and a hundred others; all milling out their well-set-up, conventional, impressive type, year after year; their mental stimulus the college entrance exams; their vague purpose set forth in a hundred circulars as "To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training as a Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting the problems of his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation in the Arts an†
Chpt 1.1

conventional = normal or typical

But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the "Amory plus Beatrice" from the ferreting eyes of a boarding-school, so St. Regis' had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him, and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory.†
Chpt 1.1

In the meanwhile Amory delicately kept trying to awaken a sense of the social system in D'Invilliers, for he knew that this poet was really more conventional than he, and needed merely watered hair, a smaller range of conversation, and a darker brown hat to become quite regular.†
Chpt 1.2

** DESCRIPTIVE Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome.†
Chpt 1.2

It was a let-down from the conventional heights they had all walked so rigidly.†
Chpt 1.2

conventional = normal or typical

Isn't that the conventional frame of mind for the young man of your age and condition?†
Chpt 2.2

Myra made out the party ahead, had an instant vision of her mother, and then—alas for convention—glanced into the eyes beside.†
Chpt 1.1 *

But she accepted his pose—it was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair.†
Chpt 1.2

You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in this "woman proposition"; but it's more than that, Amory; it's the fear that what you begin you can't stop; you would run amuck, and I know whereof I speak; it's that half-miraculous sixth sense by which you detect evil, it's the half-realized fear of God in your heart.†
Chpt 1.3

The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.†
Chpt 2.5

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
(4) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)