Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A predilection for the sentimental.
- noun An idea or expression marked by excessive sentiment.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Tendency to be swayed by sentiment; affected sensibility or sentiment; mawkish susceptibility; specifically, the philosophy of Rousseau and others, which gave great weight to the impulses of a susceptible heart.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The quality of being sentimental; the character or behavior of a sentimentalist; sentimentality.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A liking for
sentimental things - noun An overly sentimental thing or condition;
bathos orsentimentality - noun philosophy A view according to which
morality is somehow grounded inmoral sentiments oremotions .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the excessive expression of tender feelings, nostalgia, or sadness in any form
- noun a predilection for sentimentality
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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All of which you characterize as sentimentalism -- so says
Letters of Franklin K. Lane Franklin Knight Lane 1892
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On the other hand, what replaced it was far worse, and I tend to reject claims that the old sentimentalism is aesthetically equal to Glory & Praise.
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Tagore was a major world poet and artist, whose sentimentalism is sometimes misunderstood, no doubt.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) : Rigoberto González : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation 2007
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One thing for sure, there was no sentimentalism from the five-time NHL leading scorer as he took off his Pittsburgh jersey for the last time.
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What they call sentimentalism is greater sensibility, greater sympathy, a keener sense of justice.
The New Theology 1911
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There was need of such a sentiment to be somehow kindled, to counteract the ascendancy of a certain sentimentalism that prevails too much in our days.
A Sermon on the Death of Abraham Lincoln, April 15th, 1865. Pastor O. E. Daggett 1865
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The gentleman from Ohio refers in strong terms to what he calls the sentimentalism of the North.
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But "sentimentalism" -- projecting a value, often an aesthetic one, onto some aspect of the natural world, and then intervening to maintain that aspect of the world from any changes that other natural processes might otherwise bring about -- is what environmentalism is all about.
A man shoots a feral cat that was stalking endangered shore birds. Ann Althouse 2007
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Lessing, Wieland, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller (Wil - helm Münch, “Über den Begriff des Klassikers” in Zum deutschen Kultur - und Bildungsleben, Berlin [1912]), an extremely heterogeneous group of which Klopstock today would appear to belong to what is usually called sentimentalism; Lessing, in spite of his polemics against the practices of French tragedy, is a ration - alistic classicist who worshipped Aristotle; Wieland is rather a man of the Enlightenment whose art strikes us often as rococo; Herder would seem an irrationalistic preromantic.
CLASSICISM IN LITERATURE REN 1968
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Part of what complicates Wordsworth’s regendering of Della Cruscan sentimentalism is the confrontation between the real pain of rustic life — an emasculating pain, as evinced in the 1798 lyrical ballads — and the pain of romance so celebrated in the metrical ballads of Percy.
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