Word: foppishness
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...each other and indulge in gratuitous palace intrigues while he ran the country with a free hand. Although the setting is not Versailles, the characters in the play are all part of this glittering, shallow society, where conventions enforce a routine dishonesty, friendship and courting are reduced to foppish displays, and love is overwhelmed with calculation. In this setting we meet Alceste, the misanthrope, who is repelled by all the vanity and hypocrisy he sees around him and doggedly asserts his own righteousness. He is, however, madly in love with Celimene, an incorrigably trivial coquette who likes to play...
Although the criteria for choosing those privileged 150 are somewhat dubious by present standards, the 1920 version of a clubbie was not a foppish idiot most frequently found passed out in a leather chair at his club. It was presumed that if your last name was Adams and you were a St. Paul's man, you simply were a cut above the rest. This era was before the days of the self-conscious identity crisis, and if for the first 22 years of your life you were constantly reminded that you were born to lead, you generally led. Witness...
...wail seemed to echo back to the grave of Emily Brontë herself. The latest remake seems to echo back to 1939. The comparison is seldom flattering. In the earlier film Laurence Olivier constructed the role of Heathcliff like a man building a castle. Timothy Dalton, who played the foppish Prince Rupert in Cromwell, now seems less landlord than tenant. He self-consciously melts and struts, breathing hard to signify passion, curling his lip to show contempt...
...named Hank McCain (John Cassavetes) gets sprung from the pen after serving twelve years of a life sentence. "How's it feel to be outside again, Dad?" beams his benefactor at the prison gate. "Don't ever call me that," snarls McCain, who regards his foppish son with heavy-lidded suspicion...
...similar trend marked Rome long before its fall. Juvenal decried the ubiquity of foppish, feminine, perfumed males. Elagabalus appeared publicly in women's clothes. Caesar was likened to "every man's wife and every woman's husband"; Antony had a harem of men and women; and Nero is thought to have married a castrated male...