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Timeserving   Listen
noun
Timeserving  n.  An obsequious compliance with the spirit of the times, or the humors of those in power, which implies a surrender of one's independence, and sometimes of one's integrity.
Synonyms: Temporizing. Timeserving, Temporizing. Both these words are applied to the conduct of one who adapts himself servilely to times and seasons. A timeserver is rather active, and a temporizer, passive. One whose policy is timeserving comes forward to act upon principles or opinions which may promote his advancement; one who is temporizing yields to the current of public sentiment or prejudice, and shrinks from a course of action which might injure him with others. The former is dishonest; the latter is weak; and both are contemptible. "Trimming and timeserving, which are but two words for the same thing,... produce confusion." "(I) pronounce thee... a hovering temporizer, that Canst with thine eyes at once see good and evil, Inclining to them both."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Timeserving" Quotes from Famous Books



... State. They make their student-years but a pretext for a life of rough debauchery, from which they issue with a bought diploma; and, in many cases, satiated and disgusted with their own lives, they dwindle down into the timeserving reactionaries, the worst enemies of free development, because they themselves have abused in youth the little ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various

... have only attempted, to place Napoleon on the stage of action, and oppose his words, his deeds, and the truth, to the erroneous assertions of certain historians, the falsehoods of the spirit of party, and the insults of those timeserving writers, who are accustomed to insult in misfortune those, to whom they ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon



Words linked to "Timeserving" :   expedient, opportunistic



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