stiltedness

While he often succeeded, many of his efforts suffered from a certain stiltedness.

Despite some initial stiltedness, Wax found that the series has good potential.

There was no stiltedness in their silent dialogue.

He feigns to speak our language with a certain practiced stiltedness that is intended to suggest lack of familiarity.

She hid an inner wince at the stiltedness of her own turn of phrase.

I was wanting her beyond bearing, as she could tell by the altered state of my voice and the stiltedness of my movements.

I've seen the embarrassment, the gaucherie, the stiltedness at social gatherings, and the valiant attempts to bridge the two levels.

Still, she thought she might have detected a mild stiltedness to Ree's words, as if he was perhaps not speaking the precise truth.

A certain stiltedness colors not only the way Mr. Schorr writes about some events but also the behavior he means to describe.

The rest of the trainees, warned in advance that Elspeth would be watching, went about their normal activities with only a hint of stiltedness.

Each wrote letters to the Court of Appeals, featuring the usual misspellings and prison patois, in which stiltedness means seriousness.

Naturally gregarious, Mr. Lamont sometimes exhibits the learned stiltedness of the novice politician.

The director, David Warren, doesn't really have a solution for the stiltedness of the paradelike, one-at-a-time entrances called for by the script.

He and his fine actors fill the play's three acts with sly stage business and turn the stiltedness that clings to any century-old play to their advantage.

Reasonably deft colloquialism rescues this "Abduction" from abject stiltedness, but understandability simply reinforces the archeological silliness of the proceedings.

Not Andrea's arguments are undercut by this revelation and by the stiltedness of the language placed in her mouth, and this strategy on Ms. Dworkin's part is cheap.

But when these people danced to a recorded potpourri of contemporary music, the stiltedness, which helped make the domestic squabbles absurdly comic, gave way to choreography of constantly changing moods.

Still, all of the principal performers have moments of letting the audience break through the dioramic stiltedness to glimpse the swirl of inner lives in conflict with a repressive reality.

Influential Australian movie critic David Stratton praised the film as having a "special vision" with brilliant production design but said "the film frustrates because of its lethargy and stiltedness".

Some of his colleagues (Dostoyevsky among them) criticized the novel from the technical point of view, speaking of the stiltedness of the "adventure" plot and the improbability of some of its characters.

This lexicographical trend won't cure the textualists' reputation for stiltedness; reading some of these opinions is like listening to the high-school valedictorian who inevitably begins, "I didn't know what to say today, so I looked up the word 'commencement.' "

He says that as non-native speakers, they rarely used metaphors or poetic imagery, and instead relied on a "matter-of-fact reportage of feeling", resulting on a "slight stiltedness" which, he argues "is what makes ABBA great lyricist".

Cab drivers are reported to have slid bouzouki tapes from cassette slots to tune in to Radio Athens or Radio Piraeus, which compete for listeners with gibes at the other's professionalism, or lack of it, or stiltedness, or lack of that, too.