All 5 Uses of
provincial
in
A Prayer for Owen Meany
- But that year the North Vietnamese attacked more than a hundred South Vietnamese towns—more than thirty provincial capitals.†
p. 95.5
- My grandmother was outraged that there were people who actually dared to condescend to her—to treat her like some provincial fussbudget.†
p. 112.9
- When I first came to Canada, I thought it was going to be easy to be a Canadian; like so many stupid Americans, I pictured Canada as simply some northern, colder, possibly more provincial region of the United States—I imagined it would be like moving to Maine, or Minnesota.†
p. 460.3
- It was a surprise to discover that Toronto wasn't as snowy and cold as New Hampshire—and not nearly as provincial, either.†
p. 460.4 *
- On the other hand, she was one of those New Yorkers who thought she would "die" if she spent a minute outside New York— who was sure that the rest of the world was a provincial whipping post whereat people like herself, of sophisticated tastes and highly urban energies, would be lashed to the stake of old-fashioned values and virtues until she expired of boredom.†
p. 538.3
Definitions:
-
(1)
(provincial as in: provincial attitude) unsophisticated (meant disapprovingly to refer to old-fashioned or narrow-minded attitudes and ideas)
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Provincial can also mean "related to a province" or "related to the provinces." Its more literary meaning of unsophisticated originated as a pejorative term for ideas held in the provinces that were considered old-fashioned or uninformed by many who lived in the capital city.