stilted
/ˈstɪltɪd
/adjective
1(Of a manner of talking or writing) stiff and self-conscious or unnatural: we made stilted conversation...
- Although Mandy told the girls later that the lunch had ‘been very romantic’, the two-hour date saw the two behaving self consciously and chatting in a stilted manner.
- In a stilted manner, he replied, ‘I didn't do too badly.’
- Moreover, his public image was balanced somewhere between the effete decadence of a dandy and the stilted manners of an upper-class gentleman.
Synonyms
strained, forced, contrived, constrained, laboured, laborious, stiff, self-conscious, awkward, unnatural, wooden, unrelaxed;
artificial, mannered
2Standing on stilts: villages of stilted houses...
- You can stay in a grass hut with sunset views for a few pounds and it's wonderful, but for just shy of £50, you get into Bon Ton, a beautiful resort of antique stilted fishermen's houses overlooking a water-lilied lagoon.
- He will experience, together with 60 other fund raisers from across the country, the hospitality of local people in stilted houses in remote villages, as well as Ho Chi Minh city.
- Thereafter we began to shed the plantations and move into rainforest punctuated by stilted kampung houses and jackfruit trees.
2.1 Architecture (Of an arch) with pieces of upright masonry between the imposts and the springers.An aperture in the back wall is incised in the form of an unmoulded stilted arch; there is one low table round which diners slump on leather pouffes; the other tables are covered in cloths of thick striped material....
- The stilted arch, which is clearly identifiable in the watercolour, can still be seen when visiting Bowes Castle - three miles from the museum.
Derivatives
stiltedly
/ adverb ...- What I realised, though, was that while I'm really glad I went and while it was really good to be with other folk and talk, however stiltedly, about Andy, this is something I need to deal with myself, slowly, over time.
- Somewhere between Warhol and ‘Laugh-In’, their stark pastels recreate a time that might have sort of existed but probably didn't, when everyone wore cardigans and comb-overs; danced stiltedly to fey pop music; read Marx for pleasure.
- The humor, if one may call it that, consists of having Anna and Claire exchanging, in endless one-upmanship, insults whose flowery and stiltedly archaizing language is periodically littered with today's grossest obscenities.
stiltedness
- He has helped both the actors and the camera shrug off their self-conscious stiltedness and look, for the first time in the franchise, really settled in their fantastic world.
- There might be references to stem-cell research and the internet, but there is a ghost of 1970s stiltedness over these confections, as if everyone is going home for a Vesta curry and some Angel Delight after their shift.
- The disease brings on a marked slowness and stiltedness of movement, caused by the brain's increasing difficulty in transmitting its instructions to the body.