In the realm of American bourbon and rye, where the adjective straight is wielded with pride, they are lesser players that rarely receive the spotlight.
We used to pride ourselves that sleaze was a characteristic only of "lesser breeds".
We take pride in this imperial heritage, pointing with scorn at the lesser achievements of other European powers – the French, Italians, Germans, Belgians and Portuguese – whose empires we variously view as haplessly mismanaged, malignly exploitative and brutally coercive.
One pundit wrote that "Most Malaysians could not remember a time of greater prosperity or lesser inter-ethnic recrimination.... Economic indicators alone would not have captured the pride that Malaysians had discovered, perhaps for [the] first time, in being Malaysian".
By the time I went to college, near Boston, the lesser stars Yawkey had assembled around Williams had faded, and his craftsmanship, his rigorous pride, had become itself a kind of heroism.
Elliott revealed that he had deliberately shied away from ordering adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility to focus on Austen's lesser known works.
The misstep might be one of hubris or excessive pride, or because of an absorbing priority that can blind one to seeming lesser distractions.
"I mean, we used to take pride in the fact that our games didn't require updates – it was lesser studios that did that.
Once again, as in the early 13th century in Paris, Aristotle took pride of place, particularly in the realms of logic and ethics, and to a lesser extent in metaphysics and natural philosophy.
For the pros, there's also a pride in craft — working the whole pig, making the most of the so-called lesser cuts, takes real hands-on cooking.
