priggish

He was rough, absent-minded, careless, and awkward, rather priggish, and not at all agreeable to a dainty, beauty-loving girl like Rose.

If I have any fault to find with New York society, it is on account of its formal and almost priggish quiet--the female voice being usually quite lost in it--thus leaving a void in the ear, not to say the heart, that is painful to endure.

Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the engineer--the roll is endless.

"`Any little assistance,' he continued with the same queer, priggish accent, `that may obviate the necessity of my communicating with the family.'

He remembered her pretty face and priggish speeches with a sudden secret vividness which is all the bitterness of death.

How did we become such a priggish, prissy, purse-lipped, po-faced country?

Jones' uber-Englishness lends a priggish air to James that makes his behavior even more cold and unpalatable than it need be, while Curless as his alter ego is encouraged to play up his schoolboy lustiness (do we really need the rude gesture accompanying the line "I think we could all use a stiff one" when James offers to get cocktails?).

One particularly revealing scene in the movie involves Linney driving home after a romantic interlude with her priggish boss.

He said: "That's not being censorious or priggish - I hope I am neither - but you really do have to exercise a measure of judgment when you are receiving political donations.

There is no attempt to disguise the play's autobiographical origins and it is interesting that, for all Beatie's admiration for Ronnie, she inadvertently paints a pompous and priggish picture of him.

Moroccan director Farida Benlyazid uses the whiny voice of a priggish spinster from a "good family" (half-English, half-Spanish) to sketch 65 years of life in Tangiers in her adaptation of Angel Vazquez's sprawling novel.

(We read that the saint 'was a priggish child who officiously insisted on washing other people's socks').