Meaning of stiff-lipped | Babel Free

Definitions

Maintaining a stiff upper lip.

Examples

“There is no accessible public roll of the knights of the order⟳. [...] At this moment any stiff-lipped impostor may enter⟳ the jeweller's shop⟳ at the corner of Essex-street and the Strand, furnish himself with an imitation cross, and parade his counterfeit hero-certificate with impunity.”

“Again, in art, who holds the scales of notice⟳ for the Academy and the Grosvenor, and such like⟳ exhibitions? [...] a stiff-lipped, white-faced man, no longer young, whose creed is that no good pictures were painted in the English school before 1880.”

“Stiff-lipped, stiff-haired, the father gave his orders to the man in red.”

“Twyla watched it all with the stiff-lipped shock⟳ he recalled seeing on patients when he had done his emergency medicine rotation. "Don't tell⟳ me," Rob⟳ said to her. "Let⟳ me guess⟳. Your ex-husband."”

“Radical youth, who later became educated liberals, saw⟳ in the old-school factory workers of his father's generation an image of stiff-lipped industrial union men as "the principal perpetrators of racism, sexism and narrow-mindedness in American society. [...]"”

“[T]he zippy musical numbers in which Mary Poppins (a stiff-lipped Emily Blunt) whisks cherubs Annabel, John, and Georgie (Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh, and Joel Dawson, respectively) away into colorful hyperreal fantasias impress⟳.”

CEFR level