preciosity
/ˌprɛʃɪˈɒsɪti
/noun [mass noun]
Excessive refinement in art, music, or language: she uses dialect to create a poetry that is free of highbrow preciosity...
- The wit, light approach and mastery of touch, scale and color balance the figurines’ rather foppish preciosity.
- They are related to similarly proportioned glassware made in the 1890s, but the delicate tints and precarious attenuation are markers of preciosity and refinement.
- This earlier reading had been grounded in a concern that the use of ideas ‘borrowed’ from other disciplines might make poetry ‘dependent on intellectual fashions and encourage preciosity.’
Origin
Mid 19th century: suggested by French préciosité, a sense derived from Molière's Les Précieuses Ridicules (1659), a comedy in which ladies frequenting the literary salons of Paris were satirized.