noun
definition
An attempt to assume or exhibit what is not natural or real; false display; artificial show.
definition
An unusual mannerism.
Examples of affectations in a Sentence
His poems are based on societal ills and personal affectations at any given point in time.
He also has a good many violent affectations, wherein lies much of the appeal of the classic freak show.
We all agree that they're decent songwriters, but some of their vocal affectations to me are really annoying.
The affectations of riot grrl, hello kitty, little dresses, cartoon girls replacing real heroes, started to grate.
The style of Cassianus is slovenly, and shows no literary polish, but its directsimplicityis far superior to the rhetorical affectations which disfigure most of the writings of that age.
Yet he was too full of dramatic inspiration to remain perpetually victimized by the conscientious affectations of the amateur author; and, where dramatic situations are not only poetical but (as in the first act of Die Walkilre and the Waldweben scene in Siegfried) too elemental for strained language, Wagner is often supremely eloquent simply because he has no occasion to try to write poetry.
The philosophers and encyclopaedists who, by the mouth of Diderot, complimented Catherine on being superior to such female affectations as modesty and chastity, flattered her to some extent even here.
Her exasperation with the affectations of the Prussian king was unquestionably increased by her discovery that he would not be induced to apply himself to a crusade against the French Revolution, which by employing all his forces would have left Russia free to annex the whole of what remained of Poland.
The style, although marked by mannerisms, by occasional affectations and rhetorical devices, is on the whole direct and businesslike, nor is the Greek bad for the period in which he wrote.
In language they are still Scottish; if they show any southern affectations, it is (all echoes of the older aureate style notwithstanding) the affectation of Tudor and Elizabethan English.
The affectations of decadent chivalry disappeared before its humour; the lineaments of a noble nation, animated by the youth of modern Europe emerging from the middle ages, were portrayed in its enduring pictures of human experience.
Its affectations were burlesqued in Gilbert and Sullivan's travesty Patience (1881), which practically killed by ridicule the absurdities to which it had grown.
It is true that even in the Canzoniere, as Italians prefer to call that collection of lyrics, Petrarch is not devoid of faults belonging to his age, and affectations which have imposed themselves with disastrous effect through his authority upon the literature of Europe.