He wore no phylacteries, and was as far away as possible from Pecksniffian pretensions.

And even when I come to feel a final incompatibility of temper, Pecksniff was not so Pecksniffian as he has since become.

But there is something quite pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a hard task on the plea that it is not hard enough.

He hates fences, too, insisting with Pecksniffian righteousness that fences and "wilderness" don't mix.

Parents do not have to reach for the V-chip to safeguard their children's morals from such talk, because justice soon rears its Pecksniffian head.

This time, the Government has skipped the Pecksniffian dragnets of 1988 and left the drunks alone with their dreams in the city's darker doorways.

Leonard Woolf in his memoirs called Murry "Pecksniffian".

From the get-go is now used in the whitest-shoe law offices, and any Pecksniffian derogator of it deserves a figurative slap upside the head.

For a minute or two, in fact, he was hot, and pale, and mean, and shy, and slinking, and consequently not at all Pecksniffian.

That kind of a job demands the talents of genuine Pecksniffian politicians and their Pecksniffian pals.

Mr Pinch and Martin, little dreaming of the stormy weather that impended, made themselves very comfortable in the Pecksniffian halls, and improved their friendship daily.

The Day They Took the Peck out of Pecksniffian Erskine Caldwell must have felt that one lexical epoch was enough for him.

A Pecksniffian TV evangelist might conceivably-- heaven forbid--revile sin and sinners while wallowing in the conduct that he rails against.

- Time Canada, April 28, 1997 Yes, golf, that pastime of ill-dressed fogies and Pecksniffian elitists, is turning a hip and trendy corner as the millennium approaches.

-- Richard Nikonovich-Kahn "Senate leaders from both sides of the aisle opened Pecksniffian frippery holus-bolus Friday, as House Republicans vowed to roughhew the spittoon."

But what could be my Pecksniffian interest in a coziness in the financing of potentially helpful businesses has led to a clear look at "the old Dukakis" in defense and foreign affairs.

More than 100 years ago, Speakers were regularly objecting to such expressions as "guttersnipe," "seditious blasphemer," "pantaloon," "pharisees and hypocrites," and "Pecksniffian cant."

Describing a Pecksniffian scoundrel as merely hypocritically hypocritical implies that something can indeed be less than nothing, as that theory was catechized by Wilbur the pig in Charlotte's Web .

Now that we have discovered that we can slash the crime rate by simply excising the peck from Pecksniffian , so to speak, we should enter the 21st century with everybody living happily ever after.

Everything he believes in is in the plan: private ownership, bank and stock exchange systems, floating prices, business deals rooted in self-interest rather than in the Pecksniffian restrictions of Communism's old central economic dictatorship.

It's no accident that he portrays a misguided America not as an errant eagle, or even a clumsy Uncle Sam, but rather as a Pecksniffian W. C. Fields loosed upon the world.

But indeed the personal adventures of the characters are so outrageous, and so Homerically free from any pretence at or even possibility of historical veracity, that those who affect to take them seriously only make themselves Pecksniffian.

The word pundit lends itself to alliterative attack - "petty, petulant, Pecksniffian political pundits, preying in packs on protectors of the public" - and if it is to be a target in 1992, we will be tempted to defend our glorious calling.

After an initial case of nerves, he slipped easily into the relaxed, slightly feline manner that fascinated viewers weeknights from 11:15 to 1 A.M. His face still has the Pecksniffian glow that makes him seem like an evangelist with a few dark secrets.

In his piece, The Day They Took the Peck out of Pecksniffian [XXIII, 4], Doug Briggs observed, There is a movement to decriminalize the meanings of words that once described criminal conduct in unmistakable terms.