effeteness

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I smell a kind of effeteness, a chorus of snarling, whimpering whiners who feed their egos by snarling and whimpering and little else.

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Definitions (1)

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  1. The state of being effete; exhaustion; barrenness. What would have been the result to mankind … if the hope of the world's rejuvenescence had been met solely by that effeteness of corruption [the old Roman empire]? Buckle, Civilization, I. 221.

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Examples (27)

  • I smell a kind of effeteness, a chorus of snarling, whimpering whiners who feed their egos by snarling and whimpering and little else. —  Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
  • The iconoclastic scorn of youth's idealism for the effeteness of the 'old hunkers', as Whitman called them, has rarely rung out more sharply than in the closing stanzas of Claudel's great Palm Sunday ode. —  Recent Developments in European Thought
  • Look at the Baptism, the Pharisee and the Publican, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Saint Peter walking on the Sea, the Magdalen at the feet of Jesus, the ridiculous Consummatum est_--look at them all: these prints are matchless for platitude, effeteness, poverty of spirit. —  The Cathedral
  • The founders of the dynasties are all brave and successful warriors, who are superior to the cant of a hypercivilized state of society, which covers declining vigor and marks the first phase of effeteness, and who see that as long as there are human passions they may be molded by genius to make the many serve the few and to build up an autocracy. —  China
  • In these things, he said, lay the greatness of America and the effeteness of England. —  American Notes
 

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