couth
/kuːθ
/humorous
adjective
Cultured, refined, and well mannered: it is more couth to hold your shrimp genteelly by the tail when eating...
- Frankly, I hope that the female contestants are a bit more couth about their competitiveness than we were, Matt.
- But its chaste beauty and eccentric humor, with its touch of Dada, its move towards abstraction, and its cool, couth understanding of dance as state of mind, was strangely at one with his century.
- All perfectly couth and prosperous, not a blade of grass out of place, but unbelievably boring.
noun [mass noun]
Good manners; refinement: he has no couth, no brains and doesn’t know the meaning of the word diplomacy...
- You have more couth, more tolerance and more intelligence.
- There was no way that he should be allowed to speak for this country because he has no couth, no brains and doesn't know the meaning of the word diplomacy.
- Voters who are either female or old or both overwhelmingly feel that the lad lacks couth.
Derivatives
couthiness
- In Scotland, on the other hand, we have tended to scoff at the homespun couthiness of it all.
- Leaving aside the gulf that exists between Boswell's elegant prose and the homely couthiness of Dundee's finest, the two extremes encompass the joys and sorrows of booze and boozing.
- But while both shows are part of a new wave of Scottish comedy which tugs the beard of parochialism and sets fire to the Aran sweater of couthiness, there are more differences than similarities.
Origin
Late 19th century: back-formation from uncouth.