Definition
Condescending refers to the act of behaving in a superior and disdainful manner towards someone, particularly by patronizing them or making them feel inferior.
Pronunciation
US English
UK English
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Excerpts from News Articles
1
What she finally consented to is a spirited and winsome documentary that tells the story of a woman who progressed as the world around her struggled to achieve similar levels of enlightenment. Even within the sometimes laughably liberal enclave of children’s books, few authors have established themselves as serious alternatives to Blume, whose some 20 books, including Forever and Are You There God It’s Me, Margaret, are free of condescension and spill over with an uncanny respect for the young people they’re meant for.
2
However, as I scrolled through the social media feeds, I noticed a predictable series of condescending voices suggesting that women ought to just shut up and be grateful. A common sentiment from women in response was “It’s 2023, can you believe we still have to deal with proving gender inequities exist?” It should be an obviously rhetorical question. Apparently, it must be asked and answered.
3
However, I can’t help but find her wider point that complaints about audience behaviour are designed by a certain sect of hoi polloi who’ve learned “the right protocols, presumably learned at finishing school” to be patronising. The idea that being considerate of actors on stage and other audience members is the reserve of the upper classes is condescending and classist itself.
4
He repeatedly uses pretentious phrases like “in fine” (instead of “finally”—and goes on and on anyway), “betimes” (instead of “early”), “colloquy” (instead of “conversation”), and “bethought himself” (instead of “considered” or “reflected”). He’s even condescending towards his own characters, referring to them as “the good woman,” “the good lady,” “our young man,” “our young friends” (they’re not “mine” simply by your referring to them as such, Henry)! And then he partitions the novel into books, e.g.
5
At the time, there were extensive problems with medical education across the board in the U.S. There were no standards for curriculum or instruction. But Black medical schools’ particular problems – poor funding, insufficient faculty and inadequate facilities – were exacerbated by Jim Crow segregation and condescension from the establishment.
6
Similarly, the administration has learned that using China as a political scapegoat allows it to ‘shunt away’, to an extent, the right wing’s attacks, as has been most evident with how it re-embraced the Covid-19 laboratory leak conspiracy theory. These divisive and polarized political circumstances inside the US ultimately make diplomacy impossible, and it is very much noted that even when China has conducted diplomacy with US officials, they have shown a condescending tactic of announcing new sanctions either before or after such meetings, in order to appear ‘tough’.
7
Daniel Radcliffe has told a group of young people that adults worried about children changing gender have a ‘slightly condescending but well-meaning attitude of like, well, people are young and like… that is a huge decision’.
8
“I was strangling words before they even left my throat,” she writes in “Ordinary Notes.” She developed the reflex after a series of incidents with academic luminaries (a “famous deconstructionist,” a “famous Americanist,” a “famous British feminist psychoanalytic literary scholar”), whose condescension and all-white reading lists made it glaringly clear that they didn’t feel the need to listen to what Black people, including Sharpe, now a professor of Black studies at York University in Toronto, had to say. “It took months of vigilant attention to the placement of my hands to undo the gesture completely,” Sharpe recalls.
9
Tony Award-winning comedian Barry Humphries, internationally renowned for his garish stage persona Dame Edna Everage, a condescending and imperfectly-veiled snob whose evolving character has delighted audiences over seven decades, has died. He was 89.
10
Humphries first debuted Dame Edna in the 1950s while he was living in Australia; she was a parody of suburban housewives and based on his own mother. Known for her flamboyant glasses, wittily condescending attitude, lilac-rinsed hair and catchphrase “Hello possums!”, Humphries even wrote an autobiography called My Gorgeous Life, as the character.
11
But it was the sparkly, sassy and slightly condescending Dame Edna, not the quietly thoughtful Mr. Humphries, whom crowds came out to see and be welcomed with the signature greeting: “Hello, Possums!”
12
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Tony Award-winning comedian Barry Humphries, internationally renowned for his garish stage persona Dame Edna Everage, a condescending and imperfectly-veiled snob whose evolving character has delighted audiences over seven decades, has died. He was 89.
13
Of course, I am quite willing to hear all manner of counterpoints – although I tend to disengage from abuse, insult, and condescension – but while I felt I could write a book on the matter, I did, at minimum, wish to point out that holding such a position regarding democracy would not have been deemed highly controversial just a few years ago. It is the left who have been most keen to assert that our democracy is under threat.
14
The cake went viral. In 2021 the New York Times named burnt Basque cheesecake the “Flavor of the Year” — a title that, doubtless kindly meant, somehow seems a trifle condescending . (How do they mean, flavor? Horrible visions of burnt-Basque-cheesecake yogurt float before the eyes.
15
Which is the exact gender-flipped dynamic that makes the “present day” correspondence between Neil and Naomi so bleakly effective: Neil fawns; Naomi condescends . Neil tries to lean on his academic bonafides; Naomi calls him so cute for thinking of putting boy soldiers, boy cops, and boy criminal gangs in his story.
16
So varied are these areas of traditional awareness that anthropologists prefer to employ the plural form, knowledges—although there is much argument today about whether distinguishing between traditional knowledges and the vast range of topics known to those later settlers who displaced the original inhabitants is condescending in itself, an extension of old imperial habits toward those who were once thought of as primitive or childlike or savage.
17
The character Thurwar, with her Zen-like stillness, acts as the novel’s “middle C,” a “tuning fork” against which other characters “can be inflected.” He knew the protagonist had to be a Black woman: “I wanted someone who was right at the nexus of being loved and inherently hated and sexualized — both condescended to and revered. I feel like that’s more a woman’s experience in any power position than a man’s.”
18
We have these enormous bureaucracies that are incredibly highly paid and they enforce this rigid bureaucratic and for that matter political orthodoxy. For example, I think ‘welcome to and acknowledgement of country’ rituals are patronising, condescending virtue-signalling. Full stop! No one ever says, ‘I stole your land so come and take my house!’ But, you simply couldn’t get a uni administration job unless you’re prepared to mouth those words on a daily basis.
19
For Beijing, Washington's condescending diplomacy is unacceptable. If Washington truly wants a workable relationship with China, it should treat China as an equal partner and show due respect.
20
She takes them and their problems very seriously, even when writing the comedic parts. And it is condescending in the extreme to tell today’s embattled kids they aren’t allowed to read books that make them feel understood.
21
I think that’s a compliment. It’s just shrouded in heavily veiled condescension , that suggests human decency is a negative attribute.
22
The modesty of ostentatiously kindhearted people can come off as smug, and in his public statements, Verghese occasionally assumes a bothersome tone of condescension . His new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” focuses almost entirely on good people (to whom many terrible things happen), and given the complexity of human beings, the surfeit of grace sometimes feels unrealistic and even pretentious, as though the writer is affiliating himself with standards that ordinary humans cannot attain.
23
Everyone seems to beam, smirk and giggle their way through a story in which they do not have anything as modern as agency; these feather-headed seniors get into hopeless scrapes and have to be rescued by attentive dishy gentlemen of a certain age, played by Giancarlo Giannini, Hugh Quarshie and Vincent Riotta. The film is smothered with a syrup of condescension .
24
Among the prompts: What’s the most condescending remark you’ve ever received? Who’s the person in your life who always has to outdo everyone else? Think of the worst neighbors you’ve ever had and write the note you’d love to leave on their doorstep. Might be just the thing to help mom take the edge off.
25
One Fine Day is not a new edition of the diary but, rather, a smart and feeling rereading of it, complete with some fine black-and-white illustrations by Julian Dicken. Ian Marchant seeks to rescue his ancestor from the condescension of historians who would situate him as a déclassé yokel, and presents him instead as a forward-thinking, community-minded Tory who was on intimate terms with eminent Jacobites, such as Henry Campion.
26
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) typified the usual condescension about animism when he wrote in Totem and Taboo (1919) that ‘spirits and demons were nothing but the projection of primitive man’s emotional impulses’. But I want to extend the more charitable view of David Hume (1711-76) that we are all somewhat animistic – even secular humanists and science devotees.
27
I was charged with that sentence for the first time when I was a teenager knocking about at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon. It’s stuck around. I think it’s a compliment. It’s just shrouded in heavily-veiled condescension that suggests human decency is a negative attribute.
28
One top-performing employee in his mid-50s was fired "shortly after being stricken with a medical condition that caused his face to become disfigured," a former member of the human resources team told the EEOC in a sworn affidavit. Among staff, the top executive was also known to make condescending jokes about women, off-handed remarks that were "racially motivated" and negative comments about LGBTQ people, the affidavit says.
29
Misha Green’s script was a hot commodity in 2017, around the time “Wonder Woman” opened, which had left some studios scrambling for action movies fronted by women. There were condescending headlines propping it up as a “female empowerment” script. And, eventually, with Niki Caro signed on to direct and a movie star like Lopez on board to star and produce, it was enough for greenlight and a Netflix budget.
30
In writing candidly about the darker dimensions of her day-to-day experiences, Armstrong stood in solidarity with other women, embodying a basic truth: the joys of motherhood are often inextricable from the physical pain and emotional struggle that comes with it. The “queen of the mommy bloggers” — an incomplete, vaguely condescending label for her work — saw her calling as wider in scope.
31
The same sense of condescension surrounds the government’s £229m coastal communities fund. As one of the most damning parts of Bunting’s book explains, it has been spread pathetically thinly: £1.6m to renovate the centre of Bognor Regis, £1.4m for “a visitor centre at Walton-on-the-Naze”, £1.2m for Hastings’ new “food court”.