stolid
/ˈstɒlɪd
/adjective
Calm, dependable, and showing little emotion or animation: a stolid bourgeois gent...
- If you want a symbol of Britishness, look no further than the stolid calm that came over London last Thursday.
- I remember her as being a rather slow, stolid girl.
- To British ears, your claim not to read polls sounds like stolid indifference to public opinion, not moral strength and political courage.
Synonyms
impassive, phlegmatic, unemotional, calm, placid, unexcitable;
apathetic, uninterested, unimaginative, indifferent;
dull, bovine, lumpish, wooden, slow, lethargic, torpid, stupid
Derivatives
stolidity
/ noun ...- Neutrals in the 38,000 crowd had decided that Fiji flair was more worthy of support than Scottish stolidity, but the fact is that Fiji are on their way home and Scotland advance to Sydney and a meeting with Australia on Saturday.
- He lives in the whitewashed croft his family have owned for generations and while there is the stolidity of a Highlander about him, with a latent strength in the broad shoulders and a stout work ethic, the blue eyes still twinkle.
- The perpetrators' faces had the fleshy stolidity of candlewax.
stolidly
/ adverb ...- It hadn't stopped Leila's father becoming a flying instructor, but her mother never entered a plane after she heard this story, stolidly embroidering, two feet on the ground, while her husband waggled his wings overhead.
- He stood stolidly enough in the dock, but in life he lost his temper, cried easily - cried in front of the vice-principal of the school where he worked; cried in front of the police when they came to ask questions.
- The ladies had to stand while the seated males stolidly ignored the courtesies their fathers would have observed (presumably in the same carriages).
stolidness
- In the lead, the muscled-up actor has never looked better, and even his stolidness works here because it gives her something to play off, to tease.
- He is as fine as stolid gets - way ahead of a perennial favorite like Spencer Tracy - and his stolidness may be why he's now a general-purpose star.
- If we simply want the clarity without the alterity and possibility of deferral, our writing fixes into stolidness and cliché, and even a sense of constriction, while also limiting the reader's response and imagination.
Origin
Late 16th century: from obsolete French stolide or Latin stolidus (perhaps related to stultus 'foolish').