All 10 Uses
pious
in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
(Edited)
- And he had a good knack at getting in the complimentary thing here and there about a knight that was likely to advertise—no, I mean a knight that had influence; and he also had a neat gift of exaggeration, for in his time he had kept door for a pious hermit who lived in a sty and worked miracles.
Chpt 9pious = religious
- Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church.
Chpt 17pieties = highly religious and moral actions
- It was a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious, happy, merry and full of unconscious coarsenesses and innocent indecencies.
Chpt 21pious = religious
- they gave themselves to study of pious books,
Chpt 21 *
- I shall use no arts that come of the devil, and no elements not created by the hand of God. But is Merlin working strictly on pious lines?
Chpt 22
- The well was in a dark chamber which stood in the center of a cut-stone chapel, whose walls were hung with pious pictures of a workmanship that would have made a chromo feel good; pictures historically commemorative of curative miracles which had been achieved by the waters when nobody was looking.
Chpt 22
- Groups of gazing pilgrims stood around all and every of these strange objects, lost in reverent wonder, and envious of the fleckless sanctity which these pious austerities had won for them from an exacting heaven.
Chpt 22
- They had been left just so, all these lifetimes, and avoided with a pious fear, as things accursed.
Chpt 24
- The king and queen and many of the court do start even in this hour, to go to your valley to pay pious homage to the waters ye have restored, and cleanse themselves of sin, and see the place where the infernal spirit spouted true hell-flames to the clouds—
Chpt 24
- I judged that a sharp, bright new nickel, with a first-rate likeness of the king on one side of it and Guenever on the other, and a blooming pious motto, would take the tuck out of scrofula as handy as a nobler coin and please the scrofulous fancy more; and I was right.
Chpt 26
Definitions:
-
(1)
(pious as in: a good, pious woman) religious or highly moral
-
(2)
(pious as in: a pious hypocrite) self-righteous (acting as though one is, or believing one is highly moral when it is not true)
-
(3)
(pious as in: cling to the pious hope) (describing a hope or wish as) sincere, but highly unlikely
-
(4)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) Much more rarely, piety can refer to devotion or faithfulness as Proust used it in the book, Swann's Way:
"...but when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one's soul before Love has yet entered into one's life, then it must drift, awaiting Love's coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial piety or affection for a comrade."