"The mantelpiece was a material part of the quaint character that had endeared my buyers to the property," Ms. Cohen said.
Around 1900, artists including the Ashcan School painter Everett Shinn began flocking to the cheap rents and quaint character of the village.
Critics complained that further development in the 1970s, coupled with the rapid growth of outlying cities that served as commuter suburbs, was destroying the quaint character of the city.
He explained to Richard Williams in Melody Maker that the release of the documentary film, Woodstock, in 1970 had altered the quaint character of the community: "Everybody and his uncle started showing up at the bus station, and that was the complete opposite of what it was supposed to be".
"March" has its moments and some style, but much of it seems quaint, with character development ranging from cartoony to nil, a flaw that Mr. Lapine might explain.
Lévy cited Sarkozy's "grotesque and devastating reception of Colonel Qaddafi in Paris" as a case in point, and wrote him off as a "President who, in morphing as he has from a questionable but imposing statesman to a quaint, Warholian character, may now interest only folklorists, or students of political curiosities".
The first nationwide party convention was held in Munich in January 1923, but in September of the same year the site was moved to Nürnberg, whose quaint medieval character provided an ideal backdrop for the nationalistic pageantry of the second party congress.
With its oh-so-quaint rustic characters, "Inishmaan" has the highest twee factor of any play by Mr. McDonagh, whose works for stage ("The Lieutenant of Inishmore") and screen ("Seven Psychopaths") are notorious for their violence and body counts.
"Poppycock," which seems like the sort of quaint expression a character in a Norman Rockwell painting might use, derives from a Dutch word meaning "soft excrement".
The period details in "Watchman" include bombings in London, Middle Eastern politics that are by now quaint and one character who is deemed an oddball because he loves his computer.
And along the valley below I can hear the early morning rattle of the trains that bore me here last night from Edinburgh – just an hour away, where little steam engines once puffed along bearing the quaint names of characters from the Waverley novels such as Wizard of the Moor and Wandering Willie.
