INSULARITY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Insularity

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noun

Insularity n.

The state or quality of being an island or consisting of islands; insulation. "The insularity of Britain was first shown by Agricola, who sent his fleet round it."

Narrowness or illiberality of opinion; prejudice; exclusiveness; as, the insularity of the Chinese or of the aristocracy.

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Etymology of 'Insularity'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Insularity" Quotes from Famous Books

... be found in quantity sufficient to base an estimate only in travellers' books, in reviews, and in newspapers of the period. When all these are brought together it is found that while there was an almost universal British criticism of American social customs and habits of life, due to that insularity of mental attitude characteristic of every nation, making it prefer its own customs and criticize those of its neighbours, summed up in the phrase "dislike of foreigners"—it is found that British opinion was centred upon two main threads; first America as a place for emigration and, ...

— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... his family remained for three years in Europe, his stay having been prolonged by political excitement in his own State of South Carolina. Commerce is apt to knock the insularity out of people; distance from one's own distinctive locality gives a wider range to the vision, and the retired merchant foresaw ruin in his State's politics, and from the viewpoint of all Europe beheld instead of the usual collection of individual States—his whole country. But the excitement ...

— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte

... dress and manner; superficially the chambermaid was as English as one could have found her in the United Kingdom, but at heart you could see she was as absolutely and instinctively a Spanish camerera as any in a hotel of Madrid or Seville. In the atmosphere of insularity the few Spanish guests were scarcely distinguishable from Anglo-Saxons, though a group of magnificent girls at a middle table, quelled by the duenna-like correctness of their mother, looked with their exaggerated hair and eyes ...

— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... 'Good-bye' has so many significations. It may be uttered at the parting for a couple of hours; it may be uttered, and often is, in these days as the final word on earth to much loved ones. Oh, these partings! how they pull a man's heart to pieces; and yet, with that remarkable insularity which characterizes our race,—or should I say races—it is one of the things seldom or never mentioned among men on service; and yet I suppose it is always uppermost in a man's mind. Again and and again I have lit upon men in out ...

— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester

... too, in yonder hybrid land This myth about a racial knot Binding the gay Hibernian and The dourly earnest Ulster-Scot— Neighbours whose one and only link (A foil to their profound disparity) Is—thanks to some volcanic kink— A common insularity. ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various

Words linked to "Insularity" : isolation, insularism, detachment, insular