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Dictionary:

conceit

  (kən-sēt') pronunciation
n.
  1. A favorable and especially unduly high opinion of one's own abilities or worth.
  2. An ingenious or witty turn of phrase or thought.
    1. A fanciful poetic image, especially an elaborate or exaggerated comparison.
    2. A poem or passage consisting of such an image.
    1. The result of intellectual activity; a thought or an opinion.
    2. A fanciful thought or idea.
    1. A fancy article; a knickknack.
    2. An extravagant, fanciful, and elaborate construction or structure: “An eccentric addition to the lobby is a life-size wooden horse, a 19th century conceit” (Mimi Sheraton).
tr.v., -ceit·ed, -ceit·ing, -ceits.
  1. Chiefly British. To take a fancy to.
  2. Obsolete. To understand; conceive.

[Middle English, mind, conception, from Anglo-Norman conceite, from Late Latin conceptus. See concept.]

SYNONYMS  conceit, egoism, egotism, narcissism, vanity. These nouns denote excessive high regard for oneself: boasting that reveals conceit; imperturbable egoism; arrogance and egotism that were obvious from her actions; narcissism that shut out everyone else; wounded his vanity by looking in the mirror.
ANTONYM  humility


 
 
Thesaurus: conceit

noun

  1. A regarding of oneself with undue favor: amour-propre, ego, egoism, egotism, narcissism, pride, vainglory, vainness, vanity. Slang ego trip. See self-love/modesty.
  2. An impulsive, often illogical turn of mind: bee, boutade, caprice, fancy, freak, humor, impulse, megrim, notion, vagary, whim, whimsy. Idioms: bee in one's bonnet. See thoughts.

verb

    To find agreeable: fancy, like, take to. See like/dislike.

 
Antonyms: conceit

n

Definition: egotism
Antonyms: humility, meekness, modesty, self-consciousness, shyness, timidity, unself-confidence

 
Literary Dictionary: conceit

conceit, an unusually far‐fetched or elaborate metaphor or simile presenting a surprisingly apt parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or feelings: ‘Griefe is a puddle, and reflects not cleare / Your beauties rayes’ (T. Carew). Under Petrarchan influence, European poetry of the Renaissance cultivated fanciful comparisons and conceits to a high degree of ingenuity, either as the basis for whole poems (notably Donne's ‘The Flea’) or as an incidental decorative device. Poetic conceits are prominent in Elizabethan love sonnets, in metaphysical poetry, and in the French dramatic verse of Corneille and Racine. Conceits often employ the devices of hyperbole, paradox, and oxymoron.

 
Architecture and Landscaping: conceit

Agreeable fabrique in a garden, usually whimsical, such as a bridge not spanning anything but there purely for ornament.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: conceit,
in literature, fanciful or unusual image in which apparently dissimilar things are shown to have a relationship. The Elizabethan poets were fond of Petrarchan conceits, which were conventional comparisons, imitated from the love songs of Petrarch, in which the beloved was compared to a flower, a garden, or the like. The device was also used by the metaphysical poets, who fashioned conceits that were witty, complex, intellectual, and often startling, e.g., John Donne's comparison of two souls with two bullets in “The Dissolution.” Samuel Johnson disapproved of such strained metaphors, declaring that in the conceit “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” Such modern poets as Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot have used conceits.

 
Poetry Glossary: Conceit

An elaborate metaphor, often strained or far-fetched, in which the subject is compared with a simpler analogue usually chosen from nature or a familiar context.

 
Word Tutor: conceit
pronunciation

IN BRIEF: n. - The trait of being unduly vain and egotistical; An artistic device or effect; A witty or ingenious turn of phrase; An elaborate poetic image or a far-fetched comparison of very dissimilar things; Feelings of excessive pride.

Tutor's tip: I "concede" (to give up, to agree) that you are right, but do not let your "conceit" (excessive pride or self-admiration) get out of hand as a result.

 
Quotes About: Conceit

Quotes:

"Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading." - W. H. Auden

"Of great wealth there is no real use, except in its distribution, the rest is just conceit." - Francis Bacon

"See the man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope for a fool than for him. [Proverbs 26:7]" - Bible

"As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves." - Daniel J. Boorstin

"Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms." - Elizabeth Bowen

"I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them." - George Eliot

See more famous quotes about Conceit

 
Wikipedia: conceit

Aside from its common usage, signifying "excessive pride", in literary terms, a conceit[1] is an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage. By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison.

Metaphysical conceit

The term is generally associated with the 17th century metaphysical poets in contemporary usage. In the metaphysical conceit, metaphors have a much more purely conceptual, and thus tenuous, relationship between the things being compared. Helen Gardner[2] observed that "a conceit is a comparison whose ingenuity is more striking than its justness" and that "a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikeness." An example of the latter would be George Herbert's "Praise (3)," in which the generosity of God is compared to a bottle which ("As we have boxes for the poor") will take in an infinite amount of the speaker's tears.

An often-cited example of the metaphysical conceit is the metaphor from John Donne's "The Flea," in which a flea that bites both the speaker and his lover becomes a conceit arguing that his lover has no reason to deny him sexually, although they are not married:

   Oh stay! three lives in one flea spare
Where we almost, yea more than married are.
   This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage-bed and marriage-temple is.

When Sir Philip Sidney begins a sonnet with the conventional idiomatic expression "My true-love hath my heart and I have his", but then takes the metaphor literally and teases out a number of literal possibilities and extravagantly playful conceptions in the exchange of hearts, the result is a fully-formed conceit.

The Petrarchan Conceit

The Petrarchan conceit, used in love poetry, exploits a particular set of images for comparisons with the despairing lover and his unpitying but idolized mistress. For instance, the lover is a ship on a stormy sea, and his mistress "a cloud of dark disdain"; or else the lady is a sun whose beauty and virtue shine on her lover from a distance.

The paradoxical pain and pleasure of lovesickness is often described using oxymoron, for instance uniting peace and war, burning and freezing, and so forth. But images which were novel in the sonnets of Petrarch became clichés in the poetry of later imitators. Romeo uses hackneyed Petrarchan conceits in describing his love for Rosaline as "bright smoke, cold fire, sick health"; and Shakespeare parodies such conceits in Sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."

History of the term

In the Renaissance, the term (which is related to the word concept) indicated any particularly fanciful expression of wit, and was later used pejoratively of outlandish poetic metaphors.

Recent literary critics have used the term to mean simply the style of extended and heightened metaphor common in the Renaissance and particularly in the 17th century, without any particular indication of value. Within this critical sense, the Princeton Encyclopedia makes a distinction between two kinds of conceits: the Metaphysical conceit, described above, and the Petrarchan conceit. In the latter, human experiences are described in terms of an outsized metaphor (a kind of metaphorical hyperbole), like the stock comparison of eyes to the sun, which Shakespeare makes light of in his sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun."

Other uses

For later literature and film, the term is sometimes used to refer to a device that stretches reality to take advantage of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called the "willing suspension of disbelief." This usage is seldom seen in formal literary criticism.

An example from popular culture is the way many cartoons feature animals that can speak to each other, and in many cases can understand human speech, but humans cannot understand the speech of animals. This conceit is seen, and sometimes exploited for plot purposes, in such films as Over The Hedge, the Balto series, and Brother Bear.

Notes

  1. ^ Definition of conceit from Wiktionary
  2. ^ Helen Gardner, The Metaphysical Poets (Oxford University Press), 1961, "Introduction" p. xxiii.

References

  • Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Princeton, NJ: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
  • Preminger, Alex and T.V.F. Brogan. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

External links


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
Translations: Translations for: Conceit

Dansk (Danish)
n. - indbildskhed, søgt åndrighed, indbildning
v. tr. - fantasere, forstå

Nederlands (Dutch)
verwaandheid, vergezocht idee, eigen opinie, sierlijk voorwerp

Français (French)
n. - vanité, suffisance
v. tr. - aimer, comprendre, concevoir

Deutsch (German)
n. - Einbildung, Überheblichkeit
v. - schmeicheln, begreifen, glauben

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - οίηση, έπαρση, επιτυχές σχήμα λόγου, παράξενη σκέψη ή ιδέα

Italiano (Italian)
presunzione

Português (Portuguese)
n. - presunção (f)

Русский (Russian)
тщеславие, самомнение, вычурность

Español (Spanish)
n. - presunción, engreimiento, vanidad
v. tr. - presumir, engreír, infatuar

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - inbilskhet, inbillning

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
自负, 狂妄, 空想, 理解, 想象, 夸赞, 喜爱

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 自負, 狂妄, 空想
v. tr. - 理解, 想像, 誇讚, 喜愛

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 자부심, 마음에 떠오른 것, 공상
v. tr. - 우쭐하다, 상상하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - うぬぼれ, 奇想, 凝った表現, 私見

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) غرور‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮יהירות, דימוי, הערכה עצמית מופרזת, ביטוי מבדח‬
v. tr. - ‮החניף (בייחוד לעצמו)‬

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Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Thesaurus. Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary Copyright © 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Answers Corporation Antonyms. © 1999-2008 by Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Literary Dictionary. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Copyright © Chris Baldick 2001, 2004. All rights reserved.  Read more
Architecture and Landscaping. A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Copyright © 1999, 2006 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
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