The Peterses are the ideal next-door neighbors, soft-spoken people so courteous that they assiduously avoided stepping on the lawns of the homes they visited.
Mr. Dimbo, 43, releases his frustrations with a daily run through the Dublin streets, and George is so unusually courteous that his sixth-grade teacher thought he was "taking the mickey"—Irish for pulling his leg.
The extent of the rot is made clear by the fact that even the supposedly most honest of sports, cricket, is blighted – a sport once so courteous that it spawned the phrase "it's just not cricket".
The New Yorker, January 4 , 1941P. 53 The New York City Tunnel Authority has tried to be so helpful about pointing out the way to its recently opened Queen-Midtown-Tunnel and its attendants are so courteous that I feel like a downright ingrate saying anything disparaging about this new way of getting to the other side of the East River.
The unhappy are most hard to tolerate when they force their discontent upon the rest of us, but Kees was too courteous for that; he simply lacked the Emersonian gift of moral levitation — everything that tells the Robinsons of this world to snap out of it, embrace their wives, say a prayer, and check their stock prices.
For example, in the following excerpt, the examinee first repeated the last adjacency pair containing the implicature; she then explained her (incorrect) interpretation by referring to a courteous behavior that routinely occurs, that is, closing the door before playing loud music so as to not disturb other people.
I admit that I flinched the first time one screeched up next to us in his car, but they'd been nothing but courteous after that, greeting us whenever we passed by.
You might start to think, and rightly so, that the men who are singling out your car, even to say "God bless you!" and not "Nice ass!" are not simply being courteous, because that's not what's courteous in New York -- it's atypical and conspicuous.
Mark Davison, the head of media relations at the Essex airport, has responded with a courteous letter that helps explain things: "Your report highlights an issue that is really key to ensuring that passengers travel through the security search area as quickly and easily as possible – preparing correctly before they leave for the airport.
Well dressed, with light hair parted at the side, and round glasses, he displays a courteous curiosity that draws secrets from socialites' lips.
They wore elegantly tailored suits and brightly colored embroidered shirts -- at a time when a rough black-and-white cowboy's outfit was the norm throughout southern Brazil -- and spoke in a refined and courteous fashion that made outsiders regard them as dandified intellectuals.
