unpressingly

comparative more unpressingly · superlative most unpressingly

1. rareNot pressingly.

   “Do you wish to stay for the interment?” asked Helda, formally and unpressingly.

   1986 December, Lois McMaster Bujold, chapter 5, in Ethan of Athos (Vorkosigan Saga), New York, N.Y.: Baen Books, published April 1994, →ISBN, page 81

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   Not high Olympus—nor your fructive earth, / E’er to such fairy-forms gave birth: / They vault with sylph-like ease and grace, / From dragons-backs, to th’ hippocampi race: / And are so light of frame, that when they roam, / They ride unpressingly the billows’ foam!

   1843, J[ohann] Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Jonathan Birch, Faust: A Tragedy, […], 2nd part, London: Chapman and Hall, […]; Leipsic: F[riedrich] A[rnold] Brockhaus, act II, scene vii, page 164

   It has wit and pleasant malice, but they are not sudden and apart from it, like set jewels, but are inherent in it, and do their work swiftly, casually, and unpressingly.

   1928 November 10, Lionel Trilling, “Virginia Woolf’s Propaganda for Grace and Wit”, in New York Evening Post; quoted in Harvey Teres, “Lionel Trilling as Public Intellectual”, in The Word on the Street: Linking the Academy and the Common Reader (The New Public Scholarship), Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2011, published 2014, →ISBN, part 1 (The Academy and the Public), page 79

   It possesses also a humble appeal of personality, a tone as unpressingly intimate as the touch of a hand on one’s arm.

   1974, Calvin Bedient, “Philip Larkin”, in Eight Contemporary Poets: Charles Tomlinson, Donald Davie, R. S. Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thomas Kinsella, Stevie Smith, W. S. Graham, London: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 77