mannerism

plural mannerisms

1. countableuncountableA noticeable personal habit, a verbal or other (often, but not necessarily unconscious) habitual behavior peculiar to an individual.

   The Inspector looked round. He knew well enough that they were alone in the study at The Turrets, but the action had become something of a mannerism with him.

   1923, Ernest Bramah [pseudonym; Ernest Brammah Smith], “(please specify the page)”, in The Eyes of Max Carrados, London: Grant Richards, →OCLC

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   In the old days, to my commonplace and unobserving mind, he gave no evidences of genius whatsoever. He never read me any of his manuscripts, […], and therefore my lack of detection of his promise may in some degree be pardoned. But he had then none of the oddities and mannerisms which I hold to be inseparable from genius, and which struck my attention in after days when I came in contact with the Celebrity.

   1897 December (indicated as 1898), Winston Churchill, chapter I, in The Celebrity: An Episode, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company; London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., →OCLC

2. countableuncountableExaggerated or affected style in art, speech, or other behavior.

   artists […] dabblingly pursuing a kind of formalist mannerism merely in the interest of careerism

   1984, Rasheed Araeen, Guy Brett, Making myself visible

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   He generally spoke without academic mannerism, though on occasion he dipped into the over-wrought thickets of eduspeak to find words like “antithetical” or “foci” or “interface.”

   1992, C Fraser Smith, Lenny, Lefty, and the Chancellor

plural mannerisms · alternative Mannerism

1. countableuncountableartIn literature, an ostentatious and unnatural style of the second half of the sixteenth century. In the contemporary criticism, described as a negation of the classicist equilibrium, pre-Baroque, and deforming expressiveness.
2. countableuncountableartIn fine art, a style that is inspired by previous models, aiming to reproduce subjects in an expressive language.

1. uncountableartA style of art developed at the end of the High Renaissance, characterized by the deliberate distortion and exaggeration of perspective and especially the elongation of figures.