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dalliance

[dal-ee-uhns, dal-yuhns]

Example Sentences

noun

a trifling away of time; dawdling.

amorous toying; flirtation.

Origin:
1300–50; Middle English daliaunce. See dally, -ance

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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Dalliance is always a great word to know.

So is flibbertigibbet. Does it mean:

a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.

the offspring of a zebra and a donkey.

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Example Sentences

Many grad school students are already in committed relationships and the lure of an overseas dalliance is insignificant.

Even on the eve of his wedding day, he insists on having an extra-curricular dalliance.

Then things begin happening fast, as though to make up for the time lost in dalliance.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

dalliance (ˈdælɪəns)

—n
1.	waste of time in frivolous action or in dawdling
2.	an archaic word for flirtation

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Matching Quote

"In short, camp mocks bad taste; kitsch exploits it. Camp arouses our sense of the ridiculous and we respond with amused tolerance. When we see Bette Davis or Ruth Gordon, fine if sometimes flamboyant performers, relax their self-discipline and overextend their acting technique in a superfluity of ineffective gestures—finger-twitching and hip-switching, hand-rubbing or hip-protruding—we label the sum total as camp. Mae West, whose nasally provocative delivery, eye-rolling, lip-pursing, and pelvic tics parody the conventional invitation to dalliance, is never out of control and is camp, pure and simple.... Camp was also the stock-in-trade of Carmen Miranda, whose retina-searing Technicolor get-ups, skyscraper headdresses bearing a season's fruit harvest, clomping platform shoes and garbled English projected in a voice that could be heard on Mars all came together beautifully in her campy personification of Exaggeration. Had we been blessed with the Brazilian Bombshell's own blazing interpretation of Joan of Arc, the grotesque, if fascinating, result would surely have been kitsch."

-Curtis F. Brown

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dalliance

dal·li·ance