Saturday, December 11, 2010

Sanctimonious

"...The Oxford English Dictionary finds the earliest occurrence of the word in 1604, with the meaning ‘holy in character,’ a sense that is now obsolete. But a mere twelve years later Shakespeare used sanctimonious to signify ‘pretended piety,’ the sense that the word retains today.

Mark Twain used sanctimonious in a letter to the Daily Alta California in 1867, describing a fellow-passenger on a voyage to the Holy Land who acted morally superior to everyone else as, "a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the trinity."

From: http://illinois.edu/db/view/25/39697?count=1&ACTION=DIALOG

Or as the bumper sticker says:

"Abstinence makes the Church grow fondlers!"

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